


I Fed You All My Sweetness, But It Wasn't To Your Taste

by TheseusInTheMaze



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Alcohol, Anal Sex, Angel Shane Madej, Angel/Human Relationships, Angst, Biblical Themes, Blow Job, Body Horror, Complicated Consent, Conflict, Fighting, M/M, Mind Meld, Multiple Orgasms, Pining, Religion Mention, Rimming, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-04
Updated: 2018-11-13
Packaged: 2019-06-21 13:23:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15558666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheseusInTheMaze/pseuds/TheseusInTheMaze
Summary: Shane... Shane has been around for a while.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've had angels/absent gods in my head for a while now. It ended up turning into this - it may become something else, who knows?

It happened on accident.

It was entirely on accident, and Shane would maintain that until the very end of the universe, which would probably happen before he actually… died, but he got himself involved in some stupidity. 

Some real stupidity. 

Since all the… whatnot had happened, it wasn’t like Shane was getting much in the way of instructions, he kind of wandered.

But still. 

There’s a difference between “being unsure as to what you were doing,” and then there was jumping into a bottomless pit with a big blinking neon arrow that said “trouble this way.” 

So a divine being joining a ghost hunting team was… a bit strange.

A bit dumb. 

More than a bit dumb.

Very dumb. 

Massively dumb. 

He’d sneered about the nephilim, but… well, now that he was walking through the mortal world, he could see it.

Maybe he’d have been down there when the rain started falling, back in the days of the ark, if he’d come down the first time. 

But here Shane was, standing in a way too small soundbooth with a mortal human, who stank of his own death, of every kind of world he might create.

He’d gotten used to the blinding light of human souls, after the first thousand years, but… well, it was still something, when the two of them were pressed so close together.

Ryan’s skin was warm - Ryan had never noticed just how hot Shane burned, partially because Shane could control it, at least a little bit. 

But he could hear Ryan’s heart beating, and Ryan was just… talking, excitedly. 

“I’m just saying, it totally sounds like a voice saying “I’m here,” doesn’t it?!”

“It sounded like someone sneezing,” Shane said, his voice dry.

It had been someone sneezing.

A spirit sneezing, admittedly, but still. 

Sneezing. 

Not “I’m here.”

“Well, who would be sneezing?”

“You and I were both sneezing,” said Shane. “It might have been the aftermath of a sneeze.”

“But it might have been a ghost sneezing!”

“Why would a ghost sneeze?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t a ghost sneeze?”

“Because when you’re a ghost, you don’t need to sneeze,” said Shane. “Presumably, as a ghost, after you shuffle off this mortal coil, you no longer have to worry about things like sneezing.”

It was… more complicated than that, but Ryan didn’t need to know that. 

“That’s reductive,” Ryan huffed, and his breath was ticklish against Shane’s skin, against the bits of Shane that weren’t, strictly tangible, but still there. 

Still able to feel it. 

It was making the hair stand up on his arms. 

“What’s reductive about it?”

“Well, maybe ghosts have the ability to sneeze,” said Ryan.

Shane rolled his eyes heavenwards, and he crossed his arms, giving Ryan a Look.

He had to fight to keep his entire presence from overtaking the whole room - it was always hard, when Ryan was in a tight space with him.

It was almost second nature at this point, or at least, it had been.

Shane hadn’t fallen hard for a mortal like this in a _very_ long time - the last one had been in Pompeii, and... well, even without someone (or Someone) causing Divine Retribution, he didn’t need to go through that kind of pain again.

Her name had been Efimia, and she had choked to death on the ashes.

“You okay, big guy?”

Ryan was looking up at Shane, his expression worried.

“Yeah, sorry,” said Shane, and he smiled at Ryan, putting on a soothing face.

“What’s up?”

“I was, uh… I was thinking about someone,” Shane said. “An ex.”

“Right,” said Ryan. “Well, I think we’re done filming?”

“Yeah, sounds good,” said Shane, and he nodded at TJ.

TJ gave them a thumbs up, and then they were alone in the small room.

“You don’t talk about your ex’s much,” said Ryan. “Anything spark it up?”

“She used to sneeze a lot,” said Shane, which was true. 

“Oh,” said Ryan. “Uh. Sorry.” 

“It’s fine,” said Shane. “So you gonna put your sneeze theory in the episode?”

“Well, yeah, it’s sneezing,” said Ryan. “Someone sneezed who wasn’t there.”

“One of our crew sneezed,” said Shane. “Or maybe my foot brushed against something. C’mon, dude.”

“Shane,” said Ryan, and he put a hand on Shane’s arm, and Shane’s senses tasted his skin, felt his blood beating through his veins, could see the flickering of Ryan’s soul through his eyes.

“Ryan,” Shane said, his tone deadpan. 

“For once in your miserable existence, just acknowledge that something is happening that you can’t explain.”

“I can explain it. But I can’t explain it right now.”

“So you can’t explain it.”

Shane snorted, and elbowed Ryan in the side. 

Ryan elbowed Shane back. 

His elbow went through some of the incorporeal… stuff that was Shane’s self, and that gave Shane a shiver, and then Ryan’s bony fucking elbow was nudging Shane in the side.

“Ow,” said Shane.

“What are you complaining about? You’re more bony than I am.”

“Well, yes, but still,” said Shane. “I’ve got… padded bits.”

“Evidently,” said Ryan, his tone dry.

“What’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“I’m not saying that you’re a skeleton with skin stretched over it,” said Ryan. “You’ve got some muscles, you’ve got fat, the whole nine yards.”

“The whole nine yards?”

“Well, that’s about how tall you are,” said Ryan.

“Oh my god,” said Shane. “Seriously?” 

“C’mon,” said Ryan. “Let’s have a night in.” 

“A night in?”

Shane looked down at Ryan, his eyebrow up. 

“We haven’t had a fun night for almost two months,” said Ryan. “C’mon. Unless you don’t like my new cologne or something.”

“New cologne?”

“Yeah. You didn’t notice?”

Shane usually didn’t notice Ryan’s cologne - it was all part of the general miasma that swarmed around Ryan. 

Shane could smell Ryan’s mortality, slowly eating him from the inside out. He could smell the tiny sins that were sizzling inside of Ryan’s soul. 

Ryan smelled like a person, and he was intoxicating for it. 

“Nope,” said Shane, then; “sorry.”

“It’s okay,” said Ryan. “I’ll have to wear a stronger one, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Shane. “Just don’t go middle school boy, huh?”

“In order to go middle school boy, I’d have to also refrain from showering,” said Ryan. “To add to the whole smelling like a goat thing.”

Shane made a face.

“Admittedly,” Ryan said, contemplative, “there isn’t a force in this world that can keep a teenage boy from smelling like a goat.” 

"... fair," said Shane, "but there's smelling like a goat, and there's smelling like a goat that wandered through a deodorant factory explosion."

"That would be a whole mix of smells, I'll tell you that."

"I feel like a deodorant factory explosion would just smell like burning," Shane said, his tone thoughtful. 

"... if you say so," said Ryan. "But yeah. You wanna come over, big guy? We can pop some popcorn, order some 'za, watch a movie." 

"Sounds like a good plan," said Shane, and he smiled at Ryan.

This was probably a bad idea - letting himself get close, letting himself... _feel_ things, that was usually a bad idea.

But temptation - they'd talked about temptation, all those eons ago, when the business with the apple, before the position in the sky had been vacated - and he was feeling it now. 

Temptation, as shiny as a ruby, as tempting as an apple. 

"Bring some booze," Ryan said. "We can make a night out of it, since it's Friday."

"You're really looking forward to this Friday stuff, huh?"

"They don't say "thank god it's Friday" for nothing, is all I'm saying," said Ryan. 

"Right," said Shane.

He leaned his arm on Ryan's shoulder - he couldn't help it.

The various... incorporeal bits of him were mingling with the various incorporeal bits of Ryan (anything with a soul has incorporeal bits, Shane's were just a lot more... there), and when you're that level of close, why not get closer? 

That's the lie that he was telling himself, at any rate.

It was a big lie, but... fuck it. 

Fuck it all. 

There wasn't anything up in the sky by dust and stars, there wasn't any higher authority that Shane was answering to anymore....

He rested his hand on Ryan's shoulder, and he squeezed it, feeling the muscle, sinew, bone, skin, all under his fingers, against Shane's own body, the real parts, and the parts that weren't.

"Looking forward to it," Shane said, and he cleared his throat. 

Ryan looked at him, and his expression was... thoughtful. 

Shane couldn't read it, although he could see the pulsing, sparking thing that was Ryan's mind. 

"You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay."

Some kind of... something had happened, and Shane wasn't sure what it was.

He wasn't sure he cared.

He was a free agent - had been a free agent since Skara Brae was still bustling full of people, and the pyramids were just a dream in some river tribe's subconscious. 

So why keep by the old rules?

... because some habits were hard to break, even after all this time. 

But fuck it.

He wrapped an arm around Ryan's shoulders, an affectionate gesture, for the sake of it, because he could.

Because he'd had some kind of shift in his thinking, right there in the sound booth.

Ryan looked up at him sidelong, one eyebrow up.

"What's going through your giant head?"

"Why does something have to be going through my giant head?"

"I mean," said Ryan, "that is how thinking generally works."

He wasn't trying to get away from Shane's arm - if anything, he was leaning into it. 

"Just having a personal revelation," Shane said.

"That ghosts exist?"

"Ghosts don't exist," Shane said in a dismissive tone of voice, and he made an equally dismissive hand gesture.

Ryan rolled his eyes, and he nudged Shane in the ribs with his elbow, and then he was leaving the small sound booth, leaving Shane on his own. 

"I'm gonna go work on some editing," he said, over his shoulder, and then he had left Shane alone in the sound booth.

Shane stood there, and the thing he had in place of a heart was beating, sending pulses of energy through him.

It was... intense.

But fuck it.

It was the twenty first century. 

He'd been holding to whatever morals he'd been entrusted to for long enough. 

He shoved his hands in his pockets, and he left the sound booth. 

* * *

And then he was sitting on Ryan's couch.

Other stuff happened, obviously - the two of them finished their work, they went to the liquor store to buy booze, but... well, now they were on Ryan's couch, and they were knee to knee, almost thigh to thigh, and the movie was playing.

It was some dumb horror movie - Ryan had asked for some biblical horror movie, and Shane had agreed, as he rolled his eyes on the inside.

Biblical stuff always annoyed him, on some level.

He wanted to yell about how they'd gotten it wrong, but, well... he'd been arguing about that since the first century, and nobody had believed him then, let alone now. 

And now, on screen, a badly done CGI river was turning into blood.

"How would that work, anyway?"

"Hm?"

Ryan was looking at Shane, his expression thoughtful.

"The turning the water to blood."

"I mean," said Shane, "it's a miracle. You don't question miracles."

It was a bit more complicated than that - you took the water, and you reminded it that it was the blood of the Earth, sort of.

... a lot of it was allegorical, and when you tried to put it into normal terms, it made no sense.

He leaned back into the couch, and the wings that were just this side of reality twitched, as the extra arms flexed, as the extra eyes blinked.

He was always... aware of those parts of himself, but they seemed closer to the surface.

Maybe it was the attraction, or something.

"I'd question a miracle," said Ryan.

His knee was drifting closer to Shane's, and Shane was letting it, until they were just... touching.

Shane was blushing.

He was aware of it.

He was aware of the quicksilver and gold ichor that was his blood thundering through his body. 

And Ryan was staring straight ahead.

"Since when do you question anything? Aren't you mister believes in everything?"

"There's a difference between ghosts and miracles," said Ryan.

"And what's that difference?"

"Miracles are... y'know," said Ryan, and he made a vague hand motion.

"Well, what would you count as a miracle, these days?"

"If I could get you to believe in ghosts, I'd see it as a miracle," said Ryan. "Or if I ever go the guts up to... never mind."

He was stopping himself mid sentence.

Shane eyed Ryan's bottle of beer, and found it nearly empty. 

It was Ryan's third beer, too.

Hm.

"You doing okay there, buddy?"

Shane wrapped his arm around Ryan's shoulders, and he gave Ryan a squeeze.

Ryan leaned into it, and he sighed.

"So, your ex," said Ryan, and his voice was almost... overly casual. 

"Mm?"

"What were they like?" 

“She was very beautiful,” said Shane. “Her eyes were grey, and she liked to eat goat cheese and olives and octopus in one disgusting mix, and she had the ugliest laugh I’ve ever heard.”

“Why’d you guys break up?”

Ryan was shifting away from Shane, and Shane took his arm back, crossing it across his own chest.

“She died,” he said, because that was simpler than going into the details.

“Oh,” said Ryan, and he looked stricken. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” said Shane, and he gave Ryan what he hoped was a reassuring smile. “I don’t talk about her much.”

“Have you had any other… partners?”

“Like, romantic partners? Sexual partners?”

He’d messed around, that was true, but nothing… substantive.

“Either, I guess,” said Ryan.

He was blushing.

Shane shrugged.

“Here and there,” he said, keeping elusive. “I’ve had a few lovers over the years, but nothing… big.”

“... I had a boyfriend,” Ryan blurted out. “In high school.”

“Yeah? What was he like?”

“His name was Jason,” said Ryan. “He was a _total_ douchebag.” 

“If he was such a douchebag, why’d you date him?”

“He had a six pack,” said Ryan, his expression dreamy. “And, uh… he was the only out gay guy at school, and I wasn’t out as being… y’know, not straight, so I was all nervous about it, but he saw through me. He made me come out in order to date him, which was a total douche thing to do, but… y’know, I still kinda remember him with fondness.”

“I think most of us remember our high school partner’s with some fondness,” Shane said.

So Ryan was queer.

He wasn’t surprised, but then again, he didn’t really… get the distinctions, as humans had them. 

“Do you?”

“Yeah,” said Shane. 

“What were they like?”

Ryan was looking up into Shane’s face with some kind of searching expression, and Shane bit back a sigh.

He didn’t have it in him to lie about it right now - he could bring up the Shane Madej that he’d crafted so carefully, lo those thirty something years ago, or he could just… change the subject.

“I’d like to kiss you right now,” Shane said. 

Ryan sputtered, and he was blushing. 

“W-what?”

“I’d like to kiss you,” Shane said again, and he kept his voice calm. “If that would be alright with you.”

“I, uh….”

“If it’s not,” Shane said, “then that’s fine. No pressure.”

And then Ryan was grabbing Shane by the hair, and their faces were more or less mashed together, and... ow.

“Wanna try that again?”

Shane pulled back, rubbing his nose and making a face.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, and he looked stricken.

Shane snorted, and he leaned in, and he kissed Ryan.

He’d forgotten how good humans tasted - their warmth, their mortality, their breath, their sins bubbling up in the air they exhaled, and Shane could get drunk on it.

He pulled Ryan closer to him, until they were chest to chest, and he deepened the kiss, swiping his tongue across Ryan’s teeth, pressing it against the tip of Ryan’s tongue.

Ryan sucked on Shane’s tongue, and then he was… he was full on climbing into Shane’s lap, straddling it, and god, Ryan’s hands were in Shane’s hair, and he seemed to be making a decent effort to eat Shane’s face.

“You’re eager,” Shane said, as if he wasn’t singing inside of the shell of humanity that he carried like a hermit crab. 

As if he didn’t want to break out of this visage of mortality, to hold Ryan to him with all his limbs, with his own wings, with his everything.

“Do you know how long I’ve wanted to do this?”

Ryan’s voice was desperate, almost whining. 

“Yeah?”

Shane cupped Ryan’s cheek, and Ryan shook, pressing closer to him.

Ryan’s cock was hard against Shane’s belly, and Ryan’s fingers were tangled in Shane’s hair, tugging on it.

If they were only two dimensions over, Ryan would be cutting his hands on Shane’s halo. 

Good thing they were in this one. 

“So long,” Ryan said, and then he was kissing Shane again. 

Shane let himself get lost in it, in the push and pull of Ryan’s lips, the softness of Ryan’s tongue, the taste of death on the very edge of Ryan’s own flavor, mingled with kindness and blasphemy, covered in humanity.

It was enough to get a saint drunk, and Shane hadn’t been a saint for millenia. 

He held Ryan as close to him as he could, and he rolled his hips forward, as his own cock pressed against Ryan’s thigh, as Ryan groaned and moaned, kissing Shane like it was the end of the world.

When they pulled apart, Ryan had his forehead against Shane’s, and he was still shaking.

“I want you to fuck me,” Ryan said, his voice utterly serious.

“Um,” said Shane, and he licked his lips, as people died loudly and gorily on screen, “not that I’m not for that idea, but do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Why would it be a bad idea?”

“It’s… it’s been a while for me,” said Shane.

He hadn’t really had sex with anyone since electricity was considered a passing fad. 

And now Ryan was squirming and grinding in his lap.

“Is this some kind of chivalry thing? Or are you worried about being easy or something?”

Shane snorted, and he rolled his eyes. 

“I don’t want you to do anything that you might regret,” Shane said. 

“I’ve been thinking about having your dick in me since the first time I saw you in nothing but a pair of pajama pants,” Ryan said, his voice flat, almost devoid of emotion.

“... oh,” said Shane. “Um.”

“So,” said Ryan, and he waggled his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, “you wanna?”

“Oh my god,” Shane groaned, and he covered his face with both hands. “That was… jesus fucking christ, Ryan.”

“What?”

Ryan looked like he was trying to sound innocent, but… yeah, he was definitely smirking. 

“I just… fuck. Dude.”

“Do you not wanna….” 

Ryan’s expression turned stricken.

“No,” said Shane. “No, no, I do, I just… like I said, I don’t want you to regret this.”

“Worst case scenario,” Ryan said, “we do this, it sucks, we add it to the metaphorical scrapbook that is our friendship, and we get on with our lives and look back on it with fondness.”

“The metaphorical scrapbook that is our friendship?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Life is just a series of things… happening, so we do it. And I’m not gonna… I’m not gonna let worrying about things possibly going wrong stop me from trying something.”

“Right,” said Shane, and he licked his lips. “Okay.”

He was going to do this.

He was going to have sex with Ryan.

He was… fuck, he was already so close to Ryan, and then Ryan was kissing him again, fumbling his button down open, and then they were parting, to pull Shane’s shirt off, and Shane was pulling Ryan’s shirt up and off, tossing it to the side, and they were skin to skin.

Ryan had almost no chest hair, and Shane had a bit, and they were pressed together with Ryan’s sweat - Ryan wouldn’t notice that Shane didn’t sweat, wouldn’t notice that Shane’s body ran hotter, but they were so close now, mouths pressed together, and Shane’s hands were on Ryan’s back, running along Ryan’s sides.

God, Ryan was… fucking intoxicating. 

Mortal, alive, made of rotting meat and gristle and bone, brought to life with whatever it was that made people alive, other than the beating heart, the lungs that filled and released.

Ryan pulled back, looking down at Shane, and he frowned, running his thumb under one of Shane’s cheekbones.

“You’re crying,” Ryan said, and he sounded surprised.

“So I am,” Shane said, and he sniffed. “Sorry.”

“No,” said Ryan, “no, it’s fine. If you’re, uh… if you’re not up for anything….”

“I am,” Shane said. “No, I’d… I want to fuck you, I do. It’s just… it’s been a while.”

As if he’d been able to imagine himself in a situation like this - in a city that was precariously balanced over a crack in the earth, which was only kept in space by the belief that it _should_ have been….

Life - or whatever it was that he had - went strange places, didn’t it?

And then they were kissing again, and Shane’s hands were down the back of Ryan’s pants, as he pulled Ryan closer to him, and they were breathing each other’s breath, and Shane’s hips were rolling up, to grind against Ryan’s ass.

“I feel like you’re about to come in your pants,” Ryan said, right against Shane’s lips.

“Sorry about that,” said Shane. 

“Don’t be,” said Ryan, and he was looking faintly sheepish. “I think it’s really hot.” 

“Yeah?” 

Shane rolled his hips again, and he moaned, tilting his head back.

It was a struggle, to keep track of which limbs he was supposed to have, which ones he needed to keep hidden.

“I want you to come in me,” said Ryan, and he kept eye contact the whole time, which was enough to make Shane flush, just a bit.

“You seem to be in a shameless mood,” Shane said, his voice dry.

“You’re assuming I had shame to begin with,” said Ryan, and he was smirking. “I should get the lube.”

“Right,” said Shane.

And then Ryan just… leaned over, to the end table, and opened the drawer.

There was a bottle of lube.

“Seriously, Ryan?!”

Shane wasn’t sure if he was amused or scandalized. 

“Listen,” said Ryan, and he looked sheepish, “I’ve got a smart TV, and I live alone, so… why not watch porn on something that’s not my laptop or my phone?”

“Oh my god, Ryan,” said Shane, and he was laughing. 

He was still laughing, when Ryan undid his pants, and then he was moaning, because a lubed up hand was wrapped around his cock, and it was… oh, fuck, that was good, that was… very good.

Shane’s head was leaning back against the couch, his head on the soft cushions of the couch, and he was fucking up into Ryan’s hand. 

“You’re bigger than I thought you’d be,” said Ryan. 

“I thought you’ve been looking at my dick,” Shane said, trying to sound casual, as he kept rolling his hips.

He’d given himself a decent sized cock, because why not?

Theoretically, he could change it, if he really wanted to.

(He didn’t really want to). 

“I mean, yeah, but you’re a grower, not a shower,” said Ryan, and he was still lubing up Shane’s cock, which was making Shane shake. 

“Thanks?”

“This is the first boner you’ve had around me,” Ryan said, and then he was kicking his own shorts off, and... yeah, that was definitely a hard cock, and Shane was reaching out, wrapping his own hand around it.

“It’s not the first boner I’ve had around you,” Shane said, and that was true. “It’s the first boner you’ve _seen_ me have around you.”

God, he could… Ryan’s heart was beating through his cock, and Shane squeezed it, giving it a long stroke, and Ryan shuddered, going weak in the knees.

“If you do that, I’m.. fuck, Shane, _please_ ,” said Ryan. 

“Give it,” said Shane, and he beckoned with one hand.

“Hm?”

“The lube. Give it.”

“Oh,” said Ryan. “Right.”

He looked faintly embarrassed, but he handed the bottle to Shane. 

“Do you want, uh… do you want condoms?”

Ryan looked faintly shy. 

“I’m, uh… I’m okay without them,” said Shane. 

It wasn’t like they’d eaten anything yet, and he trusted Ryan to inform him about… well, the various things you can encounter, with certain kinds of sex. 

Any kind of disease wouldn’t be able to live in his body. 

“Right,” said Ryan. “I am too.”

Ryan wouldn’t lie to Shane - Shane knew it. 

Shane lubed his fingers up, and then Ryan was on his lap again, and Ryan was… Ryan was fingering him open.

Wow.

This was… this wasn’t what he had expected.

He hadn’t known what he’d expected, except he was fingering Ryan’s ass open, and Ryan was moaning against Shane’s mouth, his fingers in Shane’s hair, and they were forehead to forehead. 

“God, your fingers are so long,” said Ryan, and he was… he was clenching around Shane, and he was shaking, still clinging to Shane’s hair, beginning to ride Shane’s fingers.

“You’ve seen my hands before,” Shane said, his tone mild.

His cock was hard against Ryan’s own cock. 

“Well, yeah, but… never really… no, that’s a lie.”

“Hm?”

“How are you being so _reasonable_ about this?”

Ryan’s back was arching, and his knees were digging into Shane’s sides. 

_Because I’m older than human civilization itself, so I’ve learned some patience._

“I’m a reasonable kinda guy,” said Shane, and then he was twisting his fingers inside of Ryan, pressing down on Ryan’s prostate.

Ryan sobbed, and sweat dripped down his face. 

“Dude,” said Ryan, and his voice cracked. “ _Dude_.”

“So you’re giving me shit about being too casual, but you’re calling me “dude,” in the throes of passion?”

Ryan managed to look amused. 

“Shut up, Shane,” he said. 

“Real original,” Shane groused, and he pulled his fingers out of Ryan’s ass, adding more lube to his own cock.

“I’m sorry, you want me to be original, or do you want me to ride your dick?”

Ryan was just… reaching down, lining Shane up, and his fingers slipped in the lube, but… oh, fuck, that felt better than it had a right to. 

Fuck.

Fuck, it had been too long, since he’d done this, since he’d been close to a human being, since he’d fucked, since he’d… since he’d… oh god…. 

And then Ryan was sliding down onto his cock, and it was smooth, and it was slick, and it was… tight, fuck, how was it so… god. 

Ryan kissed Shane, and he was… he was doing things with his muscles, he was squeezing, and Shane was… god, Shane was shaking, and he was losing control of some of himself, as he reached between two of them, to squeeze Ryan’s cock.

“You’re… god, you’re so hot,” said Ryan. “Fuck. You’re so… you’re so hot inside of me, it’s like you’re… oh, fuck, keep doing that, please, _please_!”

Shane snorted, and he held on to Ryan’s hips, fucking up into Ryan, and his… his essence wsa beginning to brighten up, beginning to get stronger.

He threw his head back, and was aware of his halo, pressing against the couch. 

He moaned, and his wings flared out, and Ryan squinted at him, seeing but not seeing at the same time.

“You okay… you okay, big guy?”

“Never better,” Shane said, and he flexed his cock inside of Ryan.

Ryan clenched, and Shane began to jerk him off in earnest. 

“Good to… good to know,” Ryan said, and then he laughed, a fluttering twitch around Shane’s cock. 

“Fuck, Ry,” Shane mumbled, and he was… he was going to come.

He was going to come too fucking fast.

Oh god.

“Ryan,” Shane said, and he was shaking, “Ryan, I’m… I’m gonna come, please, I’m sorry, I usually… I last longer, but… I… but….”

Shane’s wings were unfurled, burning like the sun, but Ryan couldn’t see, and then Shane was… god, Shane was coming, he was… oh… fuck….

Shane came inside of Ryan, and he kept eye contact with Ryan as he came, as the sweet, hot pleasure filled him up, left him shaking and holding on tightly to Ryan’s hips, hard enough that he was going to leave marks, because his hands were burning like brands, except… except he was blazing with light.

And then _Ryan_ was blazing with light, light from within, from his eyes, from his mouth, and it was… oh god, Ryan was coming, milking Shane’s cock for the last of whatever was left, and then Ryan was slumping forward, face first into Shane’s chest, his own come on his belly.

“Fuck,” Shane said, and he was shaking.

And Ryan was still passed out.

_Crap_.

That had never happened, the last time, but there hadn’t been the… connection then, either. 

Had it happened with Efimia?

They hadn’t actually… been intimate like that, because things were different in those days, and her parents had been worried about the leggy foreigner, with his craggy face. 

And now… Ryan was passed out, but he was breathing, and he seemed okay.

Okay.

Shane could do this. 

* * * 

He cleaned Ryan up.

He lay Ryan out in bed, and then he lay next to Ryan, and he wrapped a wing around Ryan, even though it was sorta-kinda incorporeal. 

… it was complicated like that.

He fell asleep, dread in his gut like a boulder.

* * *

Shane woke up to an empty bed, and he heaved himself upright, to find… Ryan standing in the doorframe, looking amused.

“You know, you talk in your sleep,” he told Shane, and he looked amused. “Although it sounds more like gibbering than actual, like, speech.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m great,” said Ryan, and then he shot Shane an amused look. “You gave me such good dick that I passed out.”

“Oh yeah,” said Shane, and he licked his lips. “Sorry about that.”

“Don’t you ever apologize for _that_ ,” said Ryan. 

“Well goddamn,” said Shane, and he was snickering in spite of himself.

And Ryan… winced.

Full on winced.

“You okay, buddy?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Could you maybe not say that?”

“Say what?”

“What you said. Before.”

“Goddamn?”

“Yeah. That.”

“... sure,” said Shane, although he was frowning. 

He stood up, stretching, and then he was reaching out for Ryan, and he was kissing Ryan again, because he could.

But Ryan tasted… differently.

Shane pulled back, and he looked at Ryan, squinting, just a bit.

Ryan’s soul looked… brighter.

Had… had Shane scorched some sins or whatever it was off of Ryan’s soul?

Fuck.

A ball of ice dropped in Shane’s stomach, and kept dropping.

Ryan looked up at Shane, and he frowned, reaching up for another kiss.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Shane said, and the horror washed over him as he held on tightly to Ryan, who he didn’t want to change, who he didn’t want to “purify” or whatever the fuck it was he had done. “Yeah, everything is great.”

“Okay,” said Ryan. “Good.” 

He rested his forehead against Shane’s collarbone, and Shane kept holding him tight. 

He would… he would fix this.

Somehow.

He had to.

He absolutely _had_ to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is almost entirely dialogue. I am so sorry.

It was three days later. 

Shane had kissed the top of Ryan's head, and then he had made some kind of excuse, and he'd made his way back to his own apartment, where he'd lay in bed and brooded until the sun went down.

He had... he had _changed_ Ryan. 

Full on scorched some of the sins off of Ryan's soul, which was all well and good from a divine perspective, but fuck the divine perspective.

Shane loved Ryan.

Loved Ryan, venial sins and all. 

He didn't want to turn Ryan into... what? 

A saint?

Since when was Shane able to do that, anyway?

He'd had sex with other humans before, and he hadn't made holy fire shoot out of their eyes. 

So why was this happening to him?

Why was this happening with Ryan?

Was it because he was in love with Ryan?

Maybe he just needed to stop being in love with Ryan.

Shane rolled onto his belly, and he flared his wings out, letting the dozens upon dozens of slow blinking eyes survey the room around him.

They were closer to this dimension than they had been in a very long time.

They were almost corporeal. 

He hadn't been almost corporeal in a very long time.

Fuck.

Shane pressed his face into his pillow, and his halo almost cut into the headboard.

Okay.

He had to be careful with this.

He had to make a mess out of all of this, he had to... he had to move.

He had to disappear. 

He'd regret it - he liked this life that he'd stumbled into, but... he couldn't do anything to hurt Ryan again.

But... he didn't want to leave anyone in a lurch or anything like that. 

He'd finish the season, then maybe fake his death or something like that.

Maybe he didn't even need to do that.

Maybe he just needed to withdraw a bit. 

Hmm.

He kept his face in his pillow, and he sighed.

He was going to have to get up and head to work soon.

He'd have to face Ryan.

Ryan, who had sent him a whole bunch of text messages, which Shane hadn't answered. 

Fuck.

Shane groaned again, and then he sat up, stretching his wings out. 

They were almost visible on the current spectrum - almost - and if he wasn't careful, he'd singe the bed.

Right.

Okay.

He could do this.

He just had to break Ryan's heart, break his own heart, and abandon the life that he'd gotten comfortable in.

The life he'd hoped he'd have a few decades to enjoy.

He sighed, a long, deep sound, and he stood up, to go shower. 

* * *

Shane went in to work, and he barely made eye contact with Ryan. 

He could _feel_ Ryan hurt, even from here.

Fuck. 

He had... he had to make Ryan dislike him.

But it was hard.

Especially when they had to be on assignment soon, they had to... they had to do stuff.

Shane shouldn't have thought with his dick.

Shouldn't have gotten involved with this whole mess in the first place.

He ignored Ryan all day at work, lost in memories of the past.

He pretended that he couldn't smell Ryan's hurt, couldn't see the way Ryan's soul had dimmed.

... unless that was because of Shane's divine fire or... whatever it was.

Fuck.

Shane leaned back into his seat, painfully aware of his wings pressed close to his back, painfully aware of the curious looks that he was getting.

He'd fucked it all up.

Things were easier, in the days when there was someone (or Someone) up there, calling the shots.

He didn't even miss "basking in divine glory" or whatever. 

He just missed having someone to tell him what to do. 

It had been millennia since he'd had that, but still.

You can miss things, even if it's been a long time.

"I'm going home," Ryan said, and Shane came back to the present.

He made a vague hand motion, his eyes on his laptop screen.

* * *

It lasted for another three days, before Ryan showed up at Shane's front door. 

It was... it was unexpected, to be sure, but it shouldn't have been.

Shane was lost in his own head, his mind filled with images of choking on ash, of plagues, of all the horrible things that happened to humanity.

He never should have gotten involved with Ryan, should never have gotten mixed up into the ghost hunting business, shouldn't have gotten involved in entertainment, shouldn't have gotten closed to any humans, should have run off to become some kind of holy something or other in the wilderness.

He opened his door, to find Ryan standing there, glaring up at him.

"Ryan," Shane said, and he sounded like an idiot. 

"You haven't shaved in, like, a week. You look like a muppet," said Ryan, and he pushed his way past Shane, into the apartment.

"Why are you here?"

Shane, lacking anything else to do, closed the door behind Ryan. 

"Because we need to talk," said Ryan, "and I'd rather we not talk about it at work.'

"I don't know what you're talking about," Shane said, his voice stiff.

He drew his wings close to himself, the eyes closing, and he crossed his arms across his chest.

He almost wished that Ryan could see his true form, to just... understand. 

Understand why Shane was bad news, understand why all of this was so dangerous, understand all of it. 

He was trembling, clinging to himself. 

He could see Ryan's soul, pulsing with what may have been rage or sorrow, filling up the whole room.

Ryan's soul was bright, righteous, full of... well, Ryan, and Shane hated how much brighter it was, how it had changed.

It had changed, because of Shane.

"You know what I'm talking about," Ryan said, and he looked... well, he looked very angry.

Um.

Shane licked his lips. 

"It was horrible sex," Shane said, and he was aware that he was lying through his teeth.

He was a horrible liar.

He knew he was a horrible liar. 

But what else was he going to say?

"That's bullshit," said Ryan. 

"How do you know? You don't know how my body works."

Even _Shane_ wasn't entirely sure how his own body worked, and he'd been walking around with it for eons. 

“I know that you were pretty rapturous,” said Ryan. “I’ve been having sex for a chunk of my life. I can tell when someone is enjoying themselves.”

“Maybe I wasn’t enjoying it emotionally,” Shane snapped. 

“So you couldn’t be an adult about it, and say something to me?”

Ryan looked genuinely hurt, and Shane… fuck, Shane’s heart was breaking.

He hadn’t realized his heart _could_ break, especially after all of the bullshit of coming to earth, of watching humanity change and die and be born again.

He wrapped his arms around himself.

“It’s… it’s really complicated, okay, Ryan?”

“Are you having some kind of gay panic or something?”

… and now Ryan was looking at Shane with genuine disgust, which was even worse than the hurt, somehow.

And then… then Shane did something really stupid.

_Really_ stupid. 

The kind of stupid that resulted in disasters like Atlantis. 

“I’m not… I’m bad for you,” he told Ryan, his tone earnest. 

“Bullshit,” spat Ryan.

“Excuse me?”

“Did it occur to you that I’m an adult, and I don’t need to be “protected” from whatever the fuck you think is wrong with you? What, you’ve got some emotional damage? Internalized homophobia? Fundie parents?”

Shane ground his teeth.

He’d forgotten just how… obnoxious Ryan could be, when he wanted to be.

“Could you believe me when I say that this is something serious?”

“I think that you’re overestimating yourself,” Ryan said. 

“So I’m a jerk who thinks too much of himself. Isn’t that a good sign that you should just… go off and forget about me?”

Shane was grasping at straws, and he knew it.

“In case you fuckin’ forgot about it, we’ve got responsibilities,” said Ryan, and now he was getting in Shane’s space, glaring up at Shane. 

“We can change hosts, you did it before.”

“We _literally_ started a new network,” said Ryan, and now he was shouting. “Are you just fucking caught up in your own bullshit issues or something?”

“It’s more complicated than that, Ryan,” Shane yelled back, and they were forehead to forehead. 

“I don’t believe you,” said Ryan.

“Can’t you fucking just… believe me that it’s not something you’d understand?”

“No. No, I can’t, because you’re acting like a petulant child,” said Ryan. 

And something in Shane snapped. 

Just snapped, like a fucking bone.

“I am older than you can comprehend,” he snarled at Ryan, and he was spreading his wings out, standing at his full splendor. 

Mortals had been told “be not afraid,” because the sight of Shane - Shane, or any of his brethren - was enough to draw them into gibbering madness. 

And Ryan could see it. 

He couldn’t see it, fully, but he could see enough of it that his eyes were beginning to glass over, more brightness spilling out of his eyes, his mouth, and panic washed over Shane like a wave.

Fuck.

_Fuck_.

Shane, lost in a flood of panic, pressed his forehead against Ryan’s, and... concentrated.

It had been a very long time since he’d done… well, anything with his divinity/magic/whatever the fuck it was.

He wasn’t even thinking, just acting on instinct, the way that was _never_ a good idea. 

But he didn’t want Ryan’s mind to be… burned.

He wanted… Ryan to be Ryan.

To not be fixed, to not be changed, to not be filled with divine fire.

The world had enough saints. 

The world had enough holiness. 

It only had one Ryan Bergara.

And then Shane was stretching his wings out, and they were only one dimension away, and they were nearly touching Ryan.

Shane could see all of Ryan, could see his mind, writhing like a salted slug.

Right.

Fix it.

There weren’t words for what Shane did, because it was a thing that was older than language - it was a thing that was older than thought, and also newer, because Shane was making it up as he went along.

He fixed thoughts, gluing them together, pouring some of his own essence into Ryan’s mind, into Ryan’s soul.

There would be divinity _in_ Ryan now, actual divinity, not just the scorch marks of divine fire. 

There hadn’t been a human with any divinity in their soul for… well.

Well, it had ended badly, the last time.

Shane hadn’t even been involved in that, but the ripples were still being felt today.

Shane pulled back, and he looked Ryan in the face, his own eyes dripping tears that were made of light. 

He was shaking, he was… what was he?

He didn’t fucking know.

But Ryan was blinking at Shane, his expression confused. 

“What just happened?”

“It’s… complicated,” said Shane, and he still had his hands on the back of Ryan’s head, his fingers buried in Ryan’s hair.

Ryan’s breath smelled like divinity, like himself, and Ryan’s… Ryan’s sins were still there, the gross parts of him, the human bits of him were still there.

But mixed with… mixed with fire. 

Mixed with the divinity that throbbed through Shane like a migraine. 

“I’m gonna fucking punch you if you say that to me again,” Ryan said. 

His voice was shaking, just a bit, and he looked unsteady.

Shane wrapped his arms around Ryan, pulling Ryan close.

What had he just done?

Was it worth it?

And then Ryan was squirming away, and he was glaring up at Shane.

“You’re not human, are you?”

Ryan’s tone was flat. 

Even.

“Nope,” said Shane.

It was alien, to be talking about this.

He’d been carrying it around in the interior of his mind for so long that it was… downright alien, for the words to be out in the air. 

“So you’re what, a demon?”

Shane scoffed.

“There’s no such thing as demons,” said Shane, and he made a dismissive gesture, then walked towards the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”

“I need a drink,” said Shane, and he opened a cabinet, taking out a bottle of bourbon.

“What do _you_ need a drink for?”

“Ryan,” Shane said, in a long suffering tone, “I just did something really stupid. I probably started doing something stupid a while ago, and now I’m dealing with the repercussions.”

“What repercussions?”

“You should be dead,” said Shane, and he drank straight from the bottle.

“Gee, thanks,” Ryan said. “But seriously, what’s going on.”

“Ryan,” said Shane, and he leaned against his own cabinets, “I am old. Okay. I’m… I’m older than writing. I’m older than money. I remember Skara Brae when it had people.”

“The fuck is Skara Brae?”

“It was a herding community in Scotland,” said Shane. “They left due to some… unfortunate things. They were pretty impressive. They had drainage.” 

“Drainage?” 

“Don’t look down on drainage until you’re ankle deep in your own shit,” said Shane, and he took another slug. 

“Well, okay, yeah, but how’d they have drainage?”

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” said Shane. “I was still kinda new to the whole human thing at that point. I was still endeared that they could talk.”

“So… you’re what, a demon?”

“No, I told you,” said Shane. “There’s no such thing as demons.” 

“So what are you?”

Shane shrugged. 

“I’m… a divine being? An angel, I guess, if you want to use that terminology.”

“So… if you’re an angel, what about… what about God?”

For the first time, Ryan looked scared.

Shane sighed - a long, sad noise.

“It’s… complicated,” said Shane. 

And Ryan wheeled back and punched him.

Punched him in the side, and punched him hard enough that it _hurt_.

Shane wheezed, nearly dropped the bottle, and had it taken out of his hands by Ryan.

“The fuck was that for?”

“I said I would,” Ryan said. 

“I thought you were being hyperbolic.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

“Right.”

Shane sighed, and he gave Ryan a Look, as Ryan took a drink from the bottle. 

“So tell me about God.”

“I don’t know much about anything, or Anyone,” said Shane. 

He… he didn’t talk about this much.

Who would he talk about it with?

It wasn’t like divine beings talked to each other that often - Shane hadn’t seen anyone like himself since before the first World War, and he intended to keep it that way. 

When too many divine beings were around each other things… happened. 

Things like “the invention of mustard gas” or “the splitting of the atom.”

Things that the world didn’t need anymore. 

“How can you not know?”

“A long time ago,” began Shane. 

“How long?”

“After the flood and the rainbow,” said Shane.

“What, that really happened?”

“Sort of,” said Shane. “Allegorically. Kind of.”

“Allegorically?” 

“I… I wasn’t strictly on Earth for that, exactly,” said Shane. “I didn’t exist as… this shape. Looking like this.”

“Can you change how you look?”

Ryan was looking at him with interest.

“You mean in terms of, like, shape changing?”

“Yeah.”

“It takes a while,” said Shane, “and it sucks.”

“How long is a while?”

“A few weeks, at least.”

“So God.”

“Vanished. Or died. Or stopped existing. Or maybe never existed at all, and we just thought there was a God. Or maybe there were a few of them that we didn’t know about, but they just… stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“We were being told to do things, or how to do them,” said Shane, and he leaned back, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “And then it stopped. And most of us left… where we were, and we came to Earth, and, well….”

“Did you come to Earth before that?”

“Me, particularly? No.”

“Why?”

Shane shrugged.

“Didn’t see the point,” he said. “I was… well.” 

“Well?”

Ryan didn’t look like his mind was being eaten anymore, at least. 

That was a good start.

“I… I didn’t see the point. A lot of other folks went down, fell in love with humans, had children, but that was… well.”

Ryan took another swig.

They were really putting a dent in the bourbon. 

“It went places,” Shane said, and he sighed. “It’s… it’s a thing that happened. That’s still happening. Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“After some point, there wasn’t anyone telling us what to do anymore, so we just… left. We went our separate ways, and we figured out whatever it was that we were going to do.”

“What did you do?”

“A bunch of stuff,” Shane said, and he sighed. “I tried not to influence people too badly, since the stuff with the flood showed us all how crazy shit could go. And then there were people in the desert who were claiming to talk to angels, and that was strange, but I stayed away, and then _other_ stuff was happening.”

“Did you ever think that maybe God stopped talking to you?”

Ryan looked thoughtful. 

Shane shrugged.

“Well,” he said, “regardless, there’s not much I can do about it.”

“Would you ever want to try to get some kind of answer?”

Shane shrugged again.

“I wondered for a while,” said Shane, “but it’s been a very long time.”

“How long?”

“Two, three thousand years,” said Shane.

“Oh.”

Shane reached for the drink, and he took another gulp of it. 

And then Ryan spoke out again. 

“Is that why you like history so much?”

“It’s one of the reasons, yeah,” said Shane. “It’s neat, seeing how people talk about stuff I lived through.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh yeah. It’s… the things people remembered, the things people forgot, the ways people have changed….”

“Have you always looked like this?”

“More or less,” said Shane. “I’ve changed my skin color sometimes, to fit in more, or my face, but this has been me for the last… hundred years or so.”

“How are you not, like, the Doctor? Like that one episode of Doctor Who, with all those pictures of the Doctor.”

“Since when are you a Doctor Who fan?”

“I can have other interests!”

“Well,” said Shane, “every… couple of hundred years, I move somewhere else, do something else. Change my face.”

“Oh,” said Ryan. 

“And then I was an idiot and joined Buzzfeed, since I’ve been a journalist before, and I thought film was neat, and, well….”

“Right,” said Ryan.

“I’m going to have to really change my face, when the time comes,” Shane said, and he sighed. “It’s a pity. I kinda like this one.”

“How are there not more pictures of you?”

Shane shrugged.

“I’m good at ducking out of them. Pictures haven’t been as good as they are for that long. I got lazy, I guess.”

“What was your last face like?”

“I was short, mainly.” 

“So now you decided to be tall?”

“I kinda alternate,” said Shane. “Short versus tall, stuff like that.”

“Oh,” said Ryan. “That must be weird.”

“I don’t really know how to be anything else,” said Shane. 

“So why’d you make your head so damn big?”

Shane snorted.

Some things didn’t change. 

God, he was explaining all of this stuff, all of these things that he just… knew, without explaining. 

It was weird.

“So you… hold up, why am I not, like, going crazy?”

“Going crazy?”

“I… Shane, I saw you with, like, seven wings covered in eyes, too many faces, a fucking… _halo_. What the fuck?!”

“I had to… I had to do something to you,” Shane said, and he cleared his throat, rubbing his hands together. “To your mind. It was burning up.”

“You… you altered me?”

Ryan’s face crumpled, like a balled up piece of paper.

“I didn’t want to,” Shane said quickly. “But… I… I changed you, before.”

“How?”

“When I… when I fucked you, I ended up… your soul, it got… there was divine fire. Holiness. It came out of your mouth, your eyes, and it… it “purified” your soul.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

Ryan looked confused.

“No! No, it’s not a good thing!”

Now Shane was pacing.

His wings were filling up the space, one dimension over, and Ryan was squinting - maybe he could see flashes of them.

“Isn’t being more pure… better?”

“No, because… because you’re _you_. You’re not a saint or a holy man or anything like that, you’re you, and I don’t want you to be anyone else. I don’t want to _make_ you someone else, I just want you to… I didn’t know it would happen.”

“How did you not know it would happen? Haven’t you had sex before?”

“Not that kind of intensity,” said Shane, his tone flat. “Not that kind of… connection.”

“What, really?”

“I mean,” Shane said, and he stopped pacing, “I’ve fucked people before. I’ve done that. But… the last person I felt this strongly for, it was… it was a very long time ago.”

“How long?”

“She died in Pompeii.”

“Oh. Like, visiting the site?”

“No. She choked to death on ashes.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t.” 

“Oh,” said Ryan. “So you’ve just been… grieving your lost love?”

Shane shrugged, covering his face with both hands, scrubbing it.

“It’s… it’s knowing how fragile you are. How delicate. I killed… I killed a lot of people, before I learned it.”

“You’ve _killed_ people?”

Now Ryan looked horrified.

“Not on purpose,” said Shane. “Not… often.” 

“Why would you need to kill someone?!”

“Because they were trying to kill me,” Shane said flatly. 

“I thought you couldn’t die.”

“I mean, I can’t,” said Shane. “At least, I don’t think I can. But it can still be… unpleasant. And trying to hurt me can make bad things happen.”

“What kind of bad things.”

“Explosions. Lightning. Stuff like that.”

“Oh. But I thought there wasn’t any God or anything like that.”

“Stuff doesn’t… happen because of a God or a god or whatever,” said Shane. “They happen because they happen.”

“And you can… what, call lightning down from the sky?”

Ryan was glugging back the bourbon.

The bottle was half empty now, and Ryan was swaying.

They’d just been… standing here, right in the kitchen, talking about these things, as if it was just a thing that was done. 

“Yeah,” said Shane. “Kind of.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s… it’s part of what’s real,” said Shane. “It’s part of the world, and _I’m_ part of the world, and we kind of… we reflect on each other.” 

“That makes no sense,” said Ryan. 

“This is literally a concept that is older than writing, and you expect me to try to explain it?”

“I’d think that you’d have figured it out by now,” Ryan said. 

“I never thought I’d have to explain it,” said Shane, exasperated.

“What, so you thought you’d just… wander the world by yourself until the end of the universe?”

Ryan was wobbling a lot.

“Well, yeah,” said Shane.

What else was he supposed to expect in life?

“Fuck,” said Ryan. “That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard. No wonder you’re so moody.”

Shane snorted.

“I’m not moody.”

“You totally are. You try to project this air of disaffected… something or other, but you’re really not.” 

Shane rolled his eyes.

“Regardless,” said Shane, “I’m not human.”

“Right.”

“And when we… when we had sex, it did something to you. Something that… something that changed you.”

“And then you changed me again?”

“The change I did to you on purpose was to save your mind,” said Shane. “Which… I admittedly had to do after I lost my temper, because I’m a dumbass.”

“So what, you’re afraid that if you fuck me again, you’ll scour my soul like a brillo pad or something?”

“... something like that,” said Shane. 

It sounded dumb, when Ryan described it like that.

“And you didn’t think to tell me?”

“What was I gonna tell you, Ryan? Hey, by the way, I’m actually older than human civilization, and I accidentally made it impossible for you to blaspheme?”

“... what?”

“Say “goddamnit,” Ryan,” said Shane.

Ryan winced.

“Don’t say that,” he said, and it sounded automatic.

Then Ryan frowned.

“I rest my case,” said Shane.

“Fuck you,” Ryan said. 

“Exactly.”

And then Ryan sat on the floor.

All of the booze was probably making him dizzy.

Shane sighed, and he patted the top of Ryan’s head, as Ryan rested his head on Shane’s thigh.

He was squinting at Shane’s wings, which were incorporeal and bright. 

“You’ve been trying to push me away,” Ryan said. 

“Yep,” said Shane. 

“You couldn’t just ask to not have sex anymore?”

“I’d… I’d worry about me, y’know… giving in to temptation at some point.”

“What, I’m that irresistible?”

Ryan sounded surprised.

“You’re the first person I’ve been interested in since Pompeii,” Shane said, his voice quiet.

“Oh,” said Ryan. 

“And you’re hot,” Shane added. 

“So this isn’t, like, a gay panic thing?”

“No,” said Shane. “It’s not a gay panic thing.”

“Do you, like, have a gender?”

“... what?”

Ryan used Shane’s hip to stand up, and then he was listing against Shane, his face in Shane’s neck.

“You’re an angel,” Ryan mumbled.

“I’m not exactly -”

“You might as well be an angel,” Ryan said. “And angels don’t really… have a gender.”

“I’m as much a guy as I am anything else,” Shane said. 

“So why are you a guy?”

“Because it’s easier,” Shane said. “And because I know how to work a dick better.”

“A dick doesn’t mean a guy,” Ryan pointed out.

“Well, yeah, okay, so I like having a dick and I don’t really feel like doing anything else,” said Shane. 

“Okay,” said Ryan. “But you could?”

“I mean,” said Shane, “In theory, I guess?” 

“You guess?” 

“Ryan,” Shane said, “this isn’t some… identity thing. I’m technically a different species. I work differently.”

“... does what we did count as bestiality?”

“No, Ryan,” said Shane in a long suffering tone of voice. 

“I don’t want to stop,” said Ryan. “With you. Even if it does do stuff to my soul. I want to fuck you and be fucked by you. I want to suck you and be sucked by you. I want to love you and be loved by you.”

Shane paused.

“That was awfully sincere,” Shane said.

“I’m at a level of drunk that brings about a lot of sincerity,” said Ryan.

“How did you manage to drink so much straight bourbon?”

“It’s not straight bourbon,” said Ryan, and he was cackling. “It can’t be straight bourbon, since I’m not straight!”

“You’re drunk,” Shane told Ryan. 

“And you’re not human.”

“Indeed.”

“But… fuck it,” said Ryan. “You’re not a demon, and that’s the important part.”

“There’s no such thing as demons,” said Shane.

“Why would people think there were demons, if there aren’t any?”

“People believed in blemmyae and minotaurs, too,” said Shane, and then he was walking Ryan to the couch. 

“The fuck is a blemmyae?”

“Headless people,” said Shane, and he set Ryan on the couch. 

Ryan leaned into it. 

“But headless people have always existed,” said Ryan. “It’s what happens when you take someone’s head off.”

“Nah,” said Shane. “These were, y’know, people with their face’s in their chests.”

“Oh,” said Ryan. “But. I don’t… I don’t want you to stop. Stop being my friend, stop fucking me. Unless you really don’t want me.”

He looked… baleful, and Shane’s pulse was very loud in his ears. 

“Of course I want you,” Shane said, in a dismissive tone of voice. 

“What do you mean, of course?”

“I mean of course,” said Shane. “How could I not?”

Ryan shrugged, and he looked faintly uncomfortable.

Shane sat down next to Ryan, against his better judgement.

Ryan was warm, and he smelled good, cuddled up to Shane’s side. 

Even with the faint divine energy threading through Ryan, he was still himself, and Shane… Shane loved him, with the intensity he was unaware he could still have.

Ryan shrugged.

“You’re a fuckin’ angel,” Ryan mumbled.

“I’m not an angel.”

“Whatever. You’re… you’ve got the pick of the litter, and you’re fuckin’... me.”

“Quit being so self deprecating,” Shane scolded.

He sighed, leaning back, and then Ryan… was asleep.

Asleep on Shane’s chest.

He was snoring, and he was drooling.

Fucking _really_?!

Shane sighed, stretching his legs out and closing his eyes.

Okay. 

He could do this. 

He sighed, beginning to relax into the couch.

* * *

Shane was woken up at some unknown hour later, with Ryan cuddling up to him.

“If you’re a divine being,” Ryan said, “how can you, like… sleep?”

“Sleep is nice,” said Shane. “I like sleep.”

“So my soul got… what, bleached, because of you coming in my ass?”

“Something like that, yeah,” said Shane, his head still full of sleep.

The sky had a deep blue/grey cast to it - it must have been some too early to be late, too late to be early kind of time. 

“So if you wore a condom?”

“I don’t know,” said Shane, rubbing his eyes. “It’s… it hasn’t been studied.”

“I want to make out with you right now,” said Ryan.

“Aren’t you drunk?”

“I… actually don’t really feel it anymore,” said Ryan, and he was rubbing his eyes as well, frowning.

“Huh,” said Shane, noncommittal. 

“Maybe you did something to me, when you infused me with your spiritual essence,” said Ryan. 

And then Ryan was just… in Shane’s lap.

In Shane’s lap, straddling Shane, and he was kissing Shane.

Fuck, he still tasted like himself, he was still… he was still himself.

Shane was pulling him closer, kissing him like it was the end of the world, and he was grabbing Ryan’s ass, pulling Ryan closer to him, belly to belly and chest to chest. 

Ryan’s heart was beating desperately, and Shane wrapped his wings around Ryan, holding him close, and Ryan was shaking, his hands in Shane’s hair.

“I can… on the very edge of my vision, I can… I can see stuff,” Ryan said, his voice a whisper against Shane’s lips. “You have wings, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Shane, and he gave them a flap. 

Ryan shuddered, pressed closer, clutching at Shane’s shirt. 

“I want to suck your cock,” Ryan said. “I want it in my mouth. Please.”

“What if it… what if it changes you?”

“It’s not going to change me,” said Ryan. “And if it is… it’ll be worth it.”

“Ry,” Shane said, “no dick is worth an entire personality overhaul.”

“Your dick is pretty good,” Ryan said, and he was… he was rolling his hips, his cock hard against Shane’s thigh. “I’m making a conscience choice.”

“I don’t know if I can agree with it in good conscience,” Shane said, although he was lying, just a bit.

Fuck, he wanted it so badly.

He wanted Ryan’s mouth on his cock, he wanted Ryan’s hands on his thighs, he wanted to fuck Ryan’s face. 

Fuck….

Shane’s cock twitched against Ryan’s hand, which was squeezing him through his jeans.

“I won’t let you come in my mouth,” said Ryan. 

“... okay,” said Shane. “I’ll… I’ll be okay.”

And then more kissing.

Ryan tasted like bourbon and mortality, and he was rolling his hips like the sea.

He kissed along Shane’s neck, and then he nipped, gently.

“You don’t smell like a human being,” Ryan said, and he sounded… thoughtful. 

“No?”

“No. I guess I just hadn’t noticed it,” said Ryan.

“People don’t notice a lot of things,” said Shane.

“But I want to suck your dick.”

“So suck my dick, already,” said Shane.

“A minute ago you were bitching at me for wanting to suck your dick, now you’re bitching at me for not sucking your dick,” Ryan groused. “Make up your mind already.”

Shane snorted, and he rested his hands on Ryan’s head, as Ryan got down on his knees in front of Shane. 

“I can be mercurial,” Shane said, and then Ryan was unzipping his jeans, and... there was his cock, practically springing forward, and it was dripping, desperate and throbbing.

He’d missed the feel of Ryan around his cock, missed the sensation of Ryan pressed closed to him, missed the intimacy of it.

That had been part of his shame - he wanted to keep fucking Ryan, even if it was at the cost of Ryan’s soul, and that was… that was wrong.

That was horrible.

And then Ryan’s mouth was on Shane’s cock, and Shane was leaning back into the couch, his hands in Ryan’s hair, twisting it around and around his fingers, his mouth opening wider, his wings spreading wide.

“Don’t… stop,” Shane mumbled. “Please.”

“You’re so warm,” Ryan said. “You’re so… god….”

His breath was ticklish against Shane’s cock, and then his lips were wrapped around Shane’s cock, and then… it was in his mouth. 

Shane’s cock was in Ryan’s mouth, and then Shane’s cock was going in deeper, down the back of Ryan’s throat, and Ryan was gagging, but he was keeping his mouth on it, bobbing his head, slurping and making who knew what kind of noises.

Shane moaned, thrashing, and his wings flexed, his eyes sliding shut.

_All_ of his eyes sliding shut. 

“Please,” Shane said, “please. Please, don’t stop.” 

Ryan pulled back, kissing the head of Shane’s cock. 

“Why do you keep saying that? I’m not going to stop.”

“I haven’t… it’s been… a long time,” Shane mumbled. “I guess… I g-g-guess that I’m worried it’ll… stop, but no, don’t stop, don’t… fucking stop, you feel so… fuck!”

Time went away.

Time was always a tenuous thing for Shane, what with one thing and another, but it full on left, as he flexed his wings and rolled his hips, taking in the pleasure as it rolled over him like a wave, as he sobbed and thrashed. 

He gave himself over, the way he never had before, sexually, emotionally, all of it.

He was like a clam shucked out of its shell, and he didn’t know what to… do with that, until he was about to come.

“Ry,” Shane managed to gulp out. “Ryan, don’t let me… come in you, I’ll… I could….”

And Ryan pulled off, with regret from both of them, but he was jerking Shane off, and then Shane was just… coming, coming so hard that his eyes rolled back in his head. 

It was sweet, and it was hard, leaving him shaking, his toes curling, his bones liquid. 

There was more brightness, but it wasn’t from Shane’s come- it was from Ryan’s hands.

It wasn’t… burning, it wasn’t scouring.

It was just brightness - divine light, coming straight from Ryan’s hands. 

“... that’s new,” said Ryan. 

He looked surprise. 

“Sorry,” Shane said. “I’ll… deal with that later.”

“Deal with it?”

Shane gave an awkward shrug, and then Ryan was climbing back up, and he was kissing Shane, kissing Shane like the end of the world.

Shane had seen the end of the world, seen them happen a few times.

He kissed, his tongue in Ryan’s mouth, his fingers down Ryan’s pants, and then he was pushing Ryan onto his back, on the couch, spreading Ryan’s legs open, unzipping Ryan’s pants. 

Ryan’s cock was already something like familiar, and Shane nuzzled into it, then swallowed it down, taking it in as deep as he could.

He could taste Ryan’s death on the edges of his senses, Ryan’s mortality tickling the ephemeral senses he didn’t have names for.

He bobbed his head, remembering the last time he’d done this - it had been by candle light, and the man he’d done it to had died on the end of a bayonet three months later.

He swallowed, kneading at Ryan’s thighs, and Ryan sighed and moaned and grunted, taking the pleasure that Shane was giving - just taking it and taking it, his heels digging into Shane’s back.

It was disgusting, and it was glorious - it was so… _human_ , in a way that Shane didn’t know how to describe, except it was exactly what he needed, filling his whole head up.

He had his nose pressed against Ryan’s belly, and he was kneading at Ryan’s muscled thighs as he bobbed his head and sucked, doing thighs, doing things with his lips, with his tongue.

Half remembered instincts helped him, and he lost himself in the familiarity and alienness of the human body, of a person experiencing pleasure. 

Ryan’s pre-come was salty, and his sweat was slippery against Shane’s fingers.

There was a faint air of divinity tingling against his tongues, mixed with the brightness of Ryan’s soul.

And then Ryan’s back was arching, and he was crying out as he came, as Shane swallowed it down, feeling the ghosts of pleasure along Ryan’s nerves, which sent a little tingle along his own, and then… more brightness. 

More light.

Shane kissed Ryan’s belly, and he nuzzled into it.

“Fuck,” Ryan said, and his voice cracked.

“Mm?”

“I like it better when I get to stay awake for that,” said Ryan. 

“Oh yeah,” said Shane, and he kissed along Ryan’s belly. “How are you feeling?”

“Like myself,” said Ryan. “Goddamn.”

And Shane’s stomach did a little flip.

Oh. 

_Oh._

Maybe… maybe things would be alright.


	3. Chapter 3

“So I was thinking,” Ryan said. 

“That must be a novel experience,” said Shane.

“You’re such a jerk,” said Ryan. 

“Yep,” Shane said. “That’s me.”

“So I was thinking,” Ryan said, “why do you do Ruined History, when you were, like, alive for all of that?”

“Because I wasn’t there for most of it,” said Shane. 

“You were alive.”

“Well, yeah, but… elsewhere.”

“Like what kind of elsewhere?”

“I was in China during the French Revolution,” said Shane. 

“What were you doing in China?”

“Mainly farming rice.” 

“... farming rice?”

“I bred some pigs.”

“Pigs?”

“Yeah. Spotted ones. I liked the quiet life, okay?” 

“So what happened?”

“It got harder to find.”

“Oh,” said Ryan.

They were both at Ryan’s apartment, drinking beer. 

Ryan kept staring at Shane with a look like amazement. 

It was getting annoying, honestly. 

“So… why’d you get interested in film?”

“It was….” 

Shane made a vague hand motion. 

“It was?”

“It was… different. It was a thing I’d never seen before, and it kept changing, getting better. I’ve been involved in some flavor of film stuff since I first learned that it was a thing, but… well, it was crazy, y’know?”

Shane leaned back into the couch, his hands behind his head.

“Yeah?”

“For the record, I’d never heard of Luis le Prince until we did that episode, but… y’know, film was this weird thing, where you could take ideas, or things that had happened, and they were just… there.”

Ryan was watching Shane, wide eyed. 

“I’ve… I’ve seen a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I’ve eaten mammoth, I was at the World Fair when the president got assassinated -”

“Which one?”

“The one they have the song about.”

“What song?’

“You know, from _Assassins_?” 

“No. I’m not exactly a musical person.”

“Oh. Well, I was there for that - I didn’t see him get shot, but I was in the crowd for all of that. I talked to Mark Twain at one point, but who didn’t? Oh, I met Emperor Norton.”

“... who?”

“The Emperor of America,” Shane said absently.

“ _What_?”

“America had one Emperor, and he was it. I think there was some divine being, or some kind of magic involved in that honestly, it got kinda… weird.”

“... huh.”

“I got drunk with the Mongol hordes, but again, who didn’t? Although if I never see Airag again it’ll be too soon.”

“What else?”

Ryan was staring at Shane’s face with a slightly unsettling intensity.

“I, uh, I checked out the Great Wall of China when it was pretty new. I saw the Colossus. Diogenes peed on me, but again, he peed on everyone. I saw a few different Caesars from a distance.”

“Did you ever, like, play at being a god or something like that?”

“Once,” said Shane, and he frowned. “Right after the Flood. Everyone was kinda… lost at that point

That was an unpleasant memory. 

“What was that like?”

“They killed a few goats for me, but I ended up feeling weird about it, since… y’know, they needed it more than I did. So they’d kill me a goat, and I’d say “thanks for the goat, now you eat it,” and they’d look at me like they were expecting proclamations from on high or something, which I’ve never been good at.”

“What proclamations did you give?”

“I think I made a rule about not making two types of thread in a fabric, because they kind of had me on the spot at that point.”

“Isn’t that in the bible now?”

“I think so, yeah,” said Shane. 

“Huh,” said Ryan, and he finished his beer, putting the bottle on the coffee table. “And you literally just made that up because you were on the spot?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“What were you like, before?” 

“Before what, the goats?”

“Yeah, before all of that.” 

“... I don’t know,” Shane said, and that was true.

There wasn’t a lot of space in his head for those before memories - he’d done so much stuff since then. 

“Did you not have any self awareness?”

Ryan was drinking a beer. 

There was a veritable forest of beer bottles on the coffee table.

“I didn’t have a… self. I was one of the heavenly host, or… whatever else the fuck we were,” Shane said. 

He was a bit more schnockered than he had intended to be. 

It did take a decent amount of booze to get him well and properly wasted, admittedly, but he could get there.

“We?”

“There were a bunch of us,” said Shane, his tone dreamy. “Sometimes I was a wheel with eyes, and sometimes I had the three heads, and other times….”

He shrugged.

That was mainly memory - bits of memory, that he could barely hold on to. 

“What was it like, being born?”

Ryan blinked over at Shane. 

“What?”

“Being born,” said Shane. “What was that like?” 

“What do you mean, what was it like?”

"What do you remember?" 

“I wasn’t really… aware for that.”

“Same idea,” said Shane. 

“Oh,” said Ryan, then; “I feel like I committed some big faux paus or something.”

Shane shrugged.

“There isn’t really a… guidebook for this kinda thing. Human and divine being interaction, shit like that.”

“You’ve never told another human about this stuff?”

“Not really, no,” said Shane. “Some people could tell I wasn’t human, a long time ago, but that just… got to be less and less advantageous as time went on.” 

“What do you mean?”

Shane tried to find the words for it, the way that being a thing that was beyond human used to get you left alone, until it didn’t anymore. 

He was seen as a demigod in the places that had them, or some kind of spirit, but eventually he became a dangerous thing, and you can only take being drowned or crushed or set on fire so many times before it becomes… tedious.

At least he’d learned how to keep a low profile by the time the Romans had started up the business with the lions. 

“Like I said,” Shane said. “I’m… I’m really old. I’ve seen a lot of shit. I got better at looking human. Acting human. Learning what made someone more human.”

“Like what?”

“Like blinking,” Shane said. “I forget that sometimes. I know that some of our viewers have noticed that.”

“What, that you don’t blink?”

“Yeah.”

“... I never really noticed that,” Ryan admitted. 

Shane snorted. 

“It’s something you gotta look for,” he told Ryan. “People just… expect people to act like people, and because there’s so many _more_ people, people are just… better at knowing what people are like.” 

“Better?”

“If it was just you and your family on a small homestead, if someone came along who was kinda weird… well, they were just weird because they were outsiders. Versus now people have a lot more exposure to different sorts of people, so if someone is _especially_ weird… well. You know.” 

“Weird?”

“Like, okay,” said Shane, and he sat up, resting his elbows on his thighs, wobbling just a bit. “Let’s say you’ve only seen ten people your whole life.”

“Right,” Ryan said.

“So normal was just those ten people. So if someone new is kinda weird, you just assume, ‘well, maybe they’re not like the people who I grew up with, but my family is weird’\\.” 

“Right.” 

“Versus now, where you more or less know what’s normal. You even know what’s more or less normal for people who aren’t… standard, like autism or epilepsy or whatnot.”

“Right.” 

“So in the old days, I could say I was from foreign parts and people would think that people from foreign parts just meant weird. But now people know that people from South America or whatever blink as much as anyone else.”

“So society becoming more intermingled makes life harder for divine beings?”

“Basically.”

“So do you miss it?”

Shane shrugged, reaching out with one foot to nudge at Ryan’s foot. 

“It comes and goes,” said Shane. “I miss… I miss how the world was, but I’m going to miss how the world is now, in the future.”

“It’s… you know you’re gonna see the future, huh?”

Ryan was looking at Shane with a hard to read expression. 

“I mean, yeah. We can’t die.”

“So you just… know you’re going to continue on _forever_?”

“The universe has to die eventually,” said Shane, “and when that happens, I’ll probably go with it.”

“That’s, like, the most creepy thing I’ve ever heard,” said Ryan.

Shane snorted, and then he made a surprised noise, because Ryan was standing up, wobbling towards him, and then Ryan was in his lap. 

“Sorry,” said Shane, and he wrapped his arms around Ryan, as Ryan rested his forehead against Shane’s shoulder.

“Nah,” said Ryan. 

“Nah?”

“Just nah,” said Ryan, and he sighed. “You talk a lot.”

“You were asking me questions,” Shane said. “C’mon. Gimme a break.”

“I’d rather give you my dick,” said Ryan.

“You are stupidly drunk,” said Shane. 

“Can you be smartly drunk?”

“I’m sure someone out there has managed it,” said Shane.

“Carry me to bed,” Ryan said. 

“What? No!”

Shane was amused in spite of himself. 

“Why?” 

“Ryan, I can’t lift you up. I’m not that strong.”

“You’re part of the heavenly host, aren’t you?”

“I was, in theory,” said Shane, “but this body has limits - it’s made of meat and all of that other delicate stuff, and I’m not gonna fuck up my back just because you want to see me prove the whole divine being thing or something.”

“I don’t need you to prove it,” said Ryan. “I believe you.” 

“So why do you want me to pick you up?”

“Because I want to feel all secure of being carried to bed, duh.”

“But you believe that I’m what I say I am?”

Shane was embarrassed at just how… nervous he sounded.

SInce when was he so dependent on the thoughts of a random mortal?

… apparently now.

It was scary, but he wasn’t going to poke that too hard.

Not now, when he was feeling the sweetness of… whatever this was.

“What brought your belief on? The bit where I almost melted your mind?”

“Something like that, yeah,” said Ryan, and then he was standing up again. “C’mon. Let’s go to bed.”

“Why are we going to bed?”

“Because I want to fuck you into a mattress, and it’s hard to do that when there’s no mattress.”

“Oh,” said Shane, and his cock twitched in his jeans. 

“Although I may sleep a bit first,” Ryan said, and he was still wobbling. “Because, y’know. Whiskey dick.”

“You’ve got whiskey dick?”

Shane stood up, and he stretched, his arms behind his head, his back arching enough that his back cracked.

A few dimensions over, his wings unfurled, and they flickered through the back of the chair.

Ryan frowned, and he squinted.

“I can… almost see that,” he said. 

“Almost?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “I can see the… shape of it. The flash. But if I look too closely, it disappears.”

“Sorry,” said Shane, although he wasn’t sure what he was sorry for.

His head was still spinning from all of this - a mortal knew about him, and not just any mortal but Ryan.

His best friend.

His best friend, who had a whiff of the divine about him, in a way that Shane didn’t know how to explain, except… well, it was there.

Could you even have a human mingled with the divine?

Shane remembered the Nephilim.

One theory was that the Flood happened just to deal with them, although Shane had never been sure. 

“Nah,” said Ryan, and he kissed Shane, an awkward peck on the cheek, his lips soft against Shane’s rough stubble.

“Bed,” said Shane, making his way towards the bedroom, as the world spun around him.

He had, without even thinking about it, drawn his wing around Ryan, and Ryan was leaning into him, holding on to his belt loop. 

* * *

They did bed things - tooth brushing, pissing, face washing, all of the stuff that you do before you sleep.

Shane slept flat on his stomach, and he let his wings spread out, the light of them occasionally sliding into this dimension, and he was being… careful. 

He could burn everything in a ten mile radius to a cinder, if he wasn’t careful - pure, undiluted divinity on this level of reality, in this dimension. 

He hadn’t been this… easy, this airy, since the early days.

He’d been holding on to… something, some kind of knot in his chest, and it was like being corporeal for the first time, like feeling the cool earth between his feet, the sun on his face.

It was like the old days, when he had sung the praises to something that he knew was there.

Although had he known it was real, or just believed?

Shane sighed, and he banished those thoughts to the back of his mind. 

He’d been having them since the Flood.

* * *

Shane was woken up by Ryan’s weight on his back, Ryan’s breath in his ear. 

“Y’know,” Ryan said, “it’s weird to think that you’re, like, older than time, but you never seem to be surprised anything.”

“It’s hard to be surprised, when you’ve seen weird shit. Although there’s always new weird shit.”

“Have you ever been fucked in the ass?”

Ryan was kissing along the back of Shane’s ear, and Shane was shuddering, because… well, there were a whole bunch of nice nerves in that spot.

“Yep,” said Shane.

“When was the last time?”

“A long time ago,” said Shane.

“How long?”

“We didn’t have zippers yet. And we used lard for lube.”

“Oh my god, Shane,” groaned Ryan, “I think I’m gonna lose my boner.”

He ground his cock against Shane’s hip, and Shane ground his own hips into the bed, breathing heavily. 

“From what I can tell, no power in any of the worlds could keep you from being horny.”

“There are plenty of things that kill my boners,” Ryan said, and he was climbing fully on top of Shane, his hands on Shane’s shoulders. 

Shane had forgone a shirt, and Ryan’s skin was slightly cooler than his own, and ticklish as he traced his fingertips along it. 

“Like what?”

“I’m not gonna talk about it right now,” Ryan mumbled, and then he was… nibbling at Shane’s shoulder blades, which was an odd sensation, because _technically_ Shane’s wings kinda-sorta sprouted from there, only they didn’t… exactly. 

It was one of those strange things that kind of just...happened. 

Living in this reality, living in other ones - being simultaneously made of flesh, made of light, and it was… it was complicated. 

Painfully complicated, sometimes, but at this moment, with the edge of Ryan’s mouth on his wings, but also on his skin, and the combination of it was… it was enough to make his eyes roll back in his head, as he bucked his hips, held on to the blanket and twisted it in his fingers. 

“Fuck, Ry, fuck….”

Shane was shaking his head hard enough that his head was starting to ring, and he paused. 

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” said Shane, “just… it’s… overwhelming.”

“You sure you don’t want me to stop?”

“I swear to fucking god, Ryan -”

“I thought there wasn’t one anymore,” said Ryan, in a mild tone of voice, and it was… infuriating. 

Fuck.

“Ryan, I will smite you like something out of the Old Testament,” Shane growled, and his hips were still humping into the bed, the sweet friction of his cock against his mattress enough to make his eyes cross.

“No, you won’t,” said Ryan, and then he _bit_ Shane, right on the shoulder.

Ryan’s hips were working harder, grinding his cock into Shane’s ass, and Shane was panting like he’d run a race. 

Fuck. 

Fuck, Ryan’s cock was… it was hard, and Ryan was kissing and biting, and Shane was going to die.

He was going to go against all of the rules of the universe, and he would just die, right there and then, and create some kind of singularity, he would… fuck.

“Hey Shane,” Ryan said, right in Shane’s ear, “you ever had your ass eaten?”

“... cannibalism?”

And then Ryan was laughing.

Ryan was cackling like a hyena, still on top of Shane’s back, and his whole body was shaking.

“No,” said Ryan. “Not cannibalism. I think this is the first time you’ve shown me how old you are.”

“What?”

“I’m gonna eat your ass,” said Ryan. “If you want me to.” 

“Just don’t go all Albert Fish on me, okay?”

“How the fuck do you know who Albert Fish is?”

Ryan sounded surprised.

“We have a true crime show,” said Shane. “How could I not know about Albert Fish?”

“You’re the one who is always trying to play all innocent,” said Ryan. “C’mon. You’re gonna kill my boner.”

“Your boner must not be that strong, if it gets wilted that easily.”

“Forgive me for getting less than turned on at the memory of a child murderer and cannibal,” grumbled Ryan.

“Sorry,” said Shane. 

Ryan bit him again, gently, and Shane wriggled against it, and ground forward.

“So what are you planning?” 

“I’m going to eat your ass,” Ryan said, “like I said.”

“Right,” said Shane, and then he was shivering, because Ryan was kissing down his back, and Shane’s toes were curling into his sheets, and he rolled his hips, trying to keep his place, trying not to thrash too much. 

He… thought he knew what Ryan was talking about. 

But still.

He was digging his knees into the bed, his back bowing, and he was breathing so hard his head was getting fuzzy.

He’d done it, a long time ago, but… it had a different name at that point.

And Ryan’s hands were cooler than Shane’s skin, they were almost ticklish, and Shane was writhing on the bed, in a way that he would have been embarrassed about, except it just felt _so_ good, it felt good enough to fill his whole self, good enough to make him temporarily forget… well, everything, because he was alive.

He was some kind of alive, at the very least - his whole body was on edge, and he was… sobbing, actually crying, holding on to the sheets hard enough that his knuckles were turning white.

Fuck.

His body didn’t work the same way a human’s would, but it still worked, and the nerves were made of things that weren’t meat and bone, but it was… it was something.

It was all something, and he was just gibbering in circles in his head, because Ryan had moved lower, and he had shoved Shane’s boxers down, and then he was… god, his breath was hot, and Shane had a moment to wonder about hygiene, but who the fuck cared about hygiene in a moment like this, who cared about fucking _anything_ , because Ryan’s tongue was slippery, clever, and far too wicked.

Shane dug his teeth into his own arm, and he spread his legs wider, and then Ryan was just… holding Shane’s ass open, and Ryan was fucking Shane’s ass with his tongue, Ryan was kneading at Shane’s hips.

It was… intense.

Shane’s wings were spreading wide, Shane’s back was arching, and it was… the intensity of it just filled his whole _self_ , and he kept panting, as the lickign intensified. 

Huh.

It hadn’t been this good the last time. 

Admittedly, the last time there had been… fewer hygiene options, as it were, but now Ryan was licking harder, he was… he was sucking, and he was still squeezing, kneading, and oh god, there was something building at the base of his spine, and then… he was coming, except he _wasn’t_ , exactly, his hips wriggling, his whole body on edge, and the sweetness was just… washing over him, wave after wave after wave, and it was like an orgasm, only it wasn’t, not exactly. 

He went slack, flat on the bed, and his cock was drooling out pre, slick and sloppy against his belly.

“Fuck,” said Shane, and his voice cracked.

“Hey,” Ryan said, and he kissed Shane’s lower back, a loud, smacking kiss. “Can I ask a weird question?”

“You just had your tongue up my ass,” Shane said. “I feel like I can’t really argue with anything right now.”

“Will you agree with me that ghosts exist?”

“Don’t push your luck,” said Shane.

“Can you have children?”

There were various rustling sounds coming from the bedside table, and Shane let himself stay there, sprawled out, wings fanned out, toes still curled.

His halo was halfway through the headboard, and his eyes were half shut.

Everything was just… bliss.

Fucking bliss. 

“I don’t fuckin’ know,” Shane said.

Ryan was doing something - Shane didn’t know, Shane didn’t care, as two fingers slid into his ass, and he sighed into it, grinding his hips forward, his cock was still hard.

“Would you want to try it?”

“Try what?” 

“Having a kid.”

Ryan was fucking Shane open with his fingers, and Shane was squirming on the bed, and Shane was panting, grinding back. 

“I… haven’t met anyone I’d wanna… have a kid with. Don’t… don’t know if I w-w-work like that, oh, fuck, yeah, curve your finger like… that, _fuck_!”

“Would you wanna have a kid with me, if you could?”

… the fuck?

Shane looked over his shoulder at Ryan. 

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan said, and he was looking shy.

He also had his hand around his cock, lubing it up, and he was guiding it into Shane, and that was… oh, that was a nice stretch.

“I can’t… I mean… in theory, I could… fuck, Ryan….”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Ryan, and then he was pressing closer, his forehead against Shane’s shoulder, and Shane was gasping, grinding back against it.

Okay. 

So.

It had been a while since Shane had bottomed like this.

A long while.

And Ryan was… Ryan was a lot better at this shit than he had a right to be, from the way he was holding on to Shane’s hips, and his hands were slipping with his own sweat, squeezing Shane’s hips harder.

Ryan’s hand came around, and he squeezed Shane’s cock, then stroked it.

His hand was still slippery with lube.

“Oh… fuck,” Shane whined, and then he was gasping, because Ryan’s teeth were digging into his shoulder, and he was shuddering, clenching around Ryan’s cock.

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Yeah….”

“Fuck,” Shane said again, and his wings… were flaring out, spreading out, and then Ryan was grabbing at them, and his fingers held on, for just a moment, and then they were incorporeal.

The sudden shock of contact was enough to make Shane freeze, but Ryan didn’t seem to be paying attention to that, he was just fucking Shane harder, hard enough to make the bed shake, and then Ryan was grabbing Shane’s sides again, and occasionally he’d be touching Shane’s wings.

The… strangeness of it, the intensity, it was all enough to make Shane lose track of everything, and he was just… coming.

Coming and coming, so hard that he was worried he’d pulled something, except he was just… lying there, taking it, because holy fuck.

His cock was still twitching when Ryan went still, and his cock was twitching, pumping Shane full of come, load after load.

And then Ryan was lying on top of Shane, and he pressed a kiss to Shane’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” said Ryan.

“For what?”

“Being weird,” said Ryan.

“I’m not even human,” said Shane. “I’m not even sure what counts.”

“Wouldn’t you have a better view on what counts as normal, don’t you?”

Ryan sounded amused.

He was still inside of Shane. 

“I’ve seen the rules change so many times I don’t fuckin’ know,” said Shane. 

Ryan snickered, and he kissed Shane’s back again.

“I think I shorted you out,” said Ryan.

Shane gave a vague thumbs up, and flicked one of his wings.

Ryan patted it, and his hand rested on it.

Then it slid through it, onto Shane’s back.

Shane still froze.

This… meant something.

He didn’t have the brains to figure it out just yet.


	4. Chapter 4

Ryan was shifty.

Shane would have gone so far as to call him “squirrely,” if he was one to use words like that.

As it were, he shot Ryan a sidelong look, as Ryan’s knee bounced up and down under the table, nearly hitting the bottom of the table a few times.

Shane kept looking at Ryan, who was quiet, and didn’t seem to be willing to break his silence, and metaphorically girded his loins.

“So what’s up?”

“Hm?”

“You seem upset about something.”

“... I just had a dumb question,” said Ryan, and he cleared his throat. 

“Shoot,” said Shane. “I’m always happy to answer questions.”

“... did it hurt?”

“Ryan Bergara, I swear to all the heavenly host that if you’re hitting on me with the classic “did it hurt when you fell from heaven” pick up line, I will manifest on this plane as my whole self, and I will burn everything within ten miles into a cinder.” 

“... what? No. No, that’s not what I was gonna ask,” said Ryan. 

“So what were you gonna ask?”

“Did it hurt, when your wings grew in?”

That… was unexpected.

“No,” said Shane, and he leaned back in his chair, his hands behind his head. “They were just… there. I’d ask you if it hurt when your legs grew in.”

"I don't really... remember my legs growing,' said Ryan, and he was rubbing his hands together, rocking back and forth in his seat.

He was even jiggling his knee.

What the heck.

"Yeah," said Ryan, "but you were the one who who kinda just... popped into existence."

"It was a bit more complicated than that," said Shane. 

"Was it?"

"I mean... there was a period where I didn't know who _I_ was, because I was just... you know, I was one of many. The heavenly Host was just...."

Shane stared at the ceiling, his hands behind his head, trying to put it into words.

How to describe that?

"It was... I had many bodies. Many legs. Many arms. Many... selves."

"But when did you become just one?"

Shane shrugged.

"I don't know," he said. "I know... bits and pieces of things, obviously, but I remember being on the ground, and then stuff was just... different. There was just one of me."

"Did you... did you actually, like, fall from heaven?"

"Not exactly, no," said Shane. "I more... stepped into this world, and then I was in a different world."

"How was it different?"

Ryan was looking at Shane with a very intense expression - Shane wasn't sure how to... respond to that. 

"It's... it's less, but it's also _more_ at the same time. Ideas are almost solid, but stuff that's real is... less so."

"Do you ever miss it?"

Shane blinked. 

"I don't know if I miss it, or if I miss who I was, or how... simple it was back then."

"Simple?"

"Like I said," said Shane, "you just did what you were told. You had a purpose, you followed your purpose, and then you did it. There was a joy to it, obviously - knowing what you're doing, knowing you're... wanted. Needed."

"You're still wanted and needed," Ryan said, and his hand was reaching out, patting Shane's hand. 

Shane took a deep breath, and he sighed. 

His face was wet. 

Go figure. 

"Yeah," said Shane, and he squeezed Ryan's hand. "But not on a cosmic level."

Ryan nodded.

"But then again," Shane said, trying to keep his voice chipper, "neither does anyone else."

"And you find that... comforting?"

"Oh yeah," said Shane. "It's one thing to be the only one floundering. It's another thing to be one in a big crowd."

"That's a healthy way to look at it," said Ryan. 

"I do my best."

But... yeah," Ryan said. "I've had it on my mind."

"Had what on your mind?"

Shane's shoulders were going up around his ears, although fucked if he knew why. 

Something was... happening.

There was something humming in the air, some kind of tension that was mounting and mounting. 

"You have, like, magic, right?"

Ryan's leg was still jiggling. 

"I mean...technically? It's a complicated sort of divinity."

"But you could cure cancer, or end world hunger, or shit like that, right?"

Ryan was getting up and pacing now. 

Something was definitely up. 

"It's not that simple," said Shane. 

His metaphorical hackles were up - his wings were beginning to flare. 

"Why not?"

"What do you mean, why not?"

Shane shoved his hands into his pockets, which was awkward at this angle, but his hands were beginning to ball up into fists. 

"I mean," Ryan said, and he was rounding on to Shane now, squaring his shoulders, "there are all sorts of problems in the world. You've got all this... power, and you're not using it. Why not?”

"It just... doesn't work like that," said Shane. 

"But why not?"

"Because... because it just doesn't. Because humanity has to solve its own problems, and if I used divinity, some other problem will pop up. Because that's how you get people sacrificing goats to you, or shit like that. Because if it gets too... old testament, shit goes the way of the old testament, and nobody likes that."

"But why not?"

Ryan sounded like he was pleading. 

"Because that's... not the world anymore."

"Can the world go.. back to that?"

There was something like pleading in his voice. 

"You want to go _back_ to when you were herding goats and at the will of any divine being who was around?"

"Not like that, but, like... why not something similar? Not the goats, but having divinity... helping."

Ryan's face was anxious.

"Divinity helping just leads to its own problems. To new problems."

"But ending world hunger!"

"And then your buildings are getting leprosy, or rivers are turning to blood," said Shane. 

"Why would that happen?"

"Because not all divine beings are as.. mellow as I am,"said Shane, "and that kind of power can make anyone crazy."

"But you already have all that power, don't you?"

"Not over people, not really," said Shane. 

He could reach into Ryan's chest and stop his heart, or cut off Ryan's oxygen with a thought. He could fill Ryan's lungs with water, or break every bone in Ryan's body without leaving his chair. 

But that was a body. 

One reason the changes he had inflicted on Ryan were so horrifying was because... he had changed Ryan, in a way he shouldn't have been able to.

He had changed some bit of Ryan’s _self_. 

Ryan… Ryan was still pacing, and there was something… odd about his appearance, something off about the way he was moving.

There was something like light, right over the edge of Ryan’s shoulder, and no, wait, that… that couldn’t be right. 

What?

Shane squinted, but it was… just out of the corner of his eye.

“I know you’re not sitting in my kitchen, berating me about how I haven’t cured cancer yet,” Shane said, and his tone was possibly sharper than he intended it to be, because Ryan stopped pacing, and just… looked at him.

“No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”

Ryan made a frustrated noise, and he covered his face with both hands. 

“So what’s really bugging you?”

“I just… I don’t _understand_ any of this,” said Ryan, and he flopped back into his chair, seemingly out of energy again.

Poor dude.

“What are you stuck on?”

“You’re… you’re a moral guy, right?”

“I like to think I am, yeah.”

“So if you’re a moral dude, why didn’t you… why didn’t you kill Hitler? Why didn’t you stop the war in Vietnam, or… or any of that?”

“Well, for one, there’s only one of me,” said Shane, and he tried to keep his tone mild. 

He’d thought about this stuff before, truth be told, but… well, there was only so much he could do.

“But… why?”

“I’m not… I’m not the kind of guy who can go into a hospital and heal people,” said Shane, and he hated himself for it, just a bit. “I’ve already seen so much suffering in my life. I can’t see more. I have to… I do what I can, to help people. I do what I can to make people happy, I do what I can to be a good person, as best I can, the way everyone else does.”

Ryan was looking at Shane, and his jaw was flexing. 

“Do you… do you think less of me?” 

That was bringing a lump to Shane’s throat, although he couldn’t put his thumb on why. 

“No, I don’t,” said Ryan. “I’m just… trying to wrap my head around the idea of having all that power. Over the fact that you’re just so… y’know, old.”

“It’s… it’s generally a bad idea, when divine beings get involved in the worlds of mortals. Like… involved involved. You end up with a Caligula or a Gilgamesh. Or else you end up… well, like I said, we don’t die, and the knowledge of that can drive someone crazy.”

“So all of the original heavenly host is just kinda wandering the earth?”

“In theory, yeah,” said Shane. “There actually weren’t that many of us, all things considered. We don’t see each other much, since too many of us in one place makes… things happen.”

“Things?”

“Yeah. Humans get ideas, or they get… sparks of inspiration, shit like that.”

Shane made a vague hand motion.

“That sounds like a load of shit,” said Ryan. “So divine beings are responsible for everything that humans have done?”

“No, but we’ve been responsible for some of ‘em.”

“Like what?”

“Mustard gas. The splitting of the atom. The internal combustion engine. Leaded gasoline.”

“Oh,” said Ryan. 

“And… divine beings tend to not get on that well with each other anyway.”

“Why?”

“You know how you have a brother?”

“Yeah?”

“Imagine that you’ve known him for longer than there’s been writing, and also he’s equally strong as you are, and also he’s got his own opinions about everything, but _also_ he’s strong enough to level a city.”

“... oh,” said Ryan, and he laughed, looking self conscious. “Yeah, that, uh, that makes sense.”

Then his face did… something.

“What happens if one of you guys goes crazy? Or, like… homicidal? Like, going postal, that kinda shit.”

“It hasn’t so far,” said Shane. “... as far as I know, “ he amended, after a few seconds. 

“Would you know if someone divine had gone crazy?”

“You mean, like, beyond the kind of crazy that just results in collecting Precious Moments figurines, or counting sidewalk cracks?”

“Yeah.”

“I… don’t know anyone who’s gone that kind of crazy,” said Shane. “I don’t know of anyone either.”

“So what, angels just have built in anti-crazy limits or something?”

“Maybe we have anti destroy-everything built in,” Shane said, and he shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It’s... it’s all complicated.”

“Do you ever have urges to, like, perform miracles or something like that?”

Shane shrugged.

“Maybe I did in the old days, but it’s been so long that I’ve gotten over it.”

“Right,” said Ryan, and he was looking… what was he looking?

Shane could see the brightness of Ryan’s soul, roiling and boiling around him, in a way that Shane couldn’t read.

Then again, Ryan also had a bit of himself glued together with divine fire now, and that… that could do things to a person, in theory.

Not that Shane entirely… understood it, but, well… he had to see something new now and again, didn’t he?

Just by dint of the fact that the world was always offering new things.

“I… do you….”

Ryan made a frustrated noise, and scrubbed his face with both hands.

“What’s up?”

“It’s complicated,” said Ryan.

“No wonder you hate it when I do that,” said Shane. “It’s kinda frustrating.”

“I owe you some frustration,” Ryan said, and he was leaning against the counter now, arms crossed across his chest, shifting his weight from foot to foot. 

“Is that a comment on the fact that I’m so sexy that you’re endlessly frustrated?”

Shane kept his voice completely deadpan throughout the sentence, and Ryan burst out laughing.

“Oh my god,” said Ryan, and he covered his face with both hands, as he laughed harder, and his head was tilting back, as he cackled up to the ceiling. 

“Nope, we covered that,” said Shane, his tone amicable.

Ryan gave Shane the finger.

Shane smirked, one eyebrow up.

“Is that an offer?”

“I’m offering a lot of things,” Ryan said, and it wasn’t even… sex.

Well, the way he said it wasn’t sexy. 

The thing he said was sexy, and Shane’s cock gave an interested twitch.

“What are you offering?”

Shane kept his tone casual. 

“I’m offering whatever you want,” Ryan said, and his tone was so open and so… sincere that something in Shane’s chest just seized. 

He didn’t deserve to have mortals in his life - let alone this particular mortal.

Thank fuck that he’d managed to fix whatever it was that he’d done to Ryan in the first place.

“I want a lot of things,” Shane said, still keeping his tone neutral.

And then Ryan was… stepping closer, and he was just… pulling Shane’s chair out, spreading Shane’s thighs.

The rasp of denim on denim was very loud.

Shane could hear Ryan’s heart beating. 

“What’s something you want?”

“Well,” said Shane, “for a start, I’d like for you to kiss me.”

“Just a kiss?”

“A kiss,” said Shane. 

“I am fighting so hard not to make a reference to _Mister Brightside_ ,” Ryan said.

“It was only a kiss?”

“Shut up, Shane,” said Ryan, and then he was leaning down and kissing Shane on the mouth, cradling Shane’s face in his hands, stroking Shane’s cheekbones with his thumbs. 

Shane was grinning against Ryan’s lips, as Ryan tilted Shane’s head back, and then Ryan’s tongue was inside of Shane’s mouth, and Shane was sighing, his hands on Ryan’s hips.

Shane was still marveling at Ryan’s mortality - the slightly dusty taste of it against his mouth, the thrum of Ryan’s heart….

It was all so strange, so intoxicating, a bit like being drunk, only… moreso.

He kissed Ryan like the world was ending, because it was, as the seconds ticked by. 

And then Ryan was getting into his lap, straddling him, fingers in his hair, and a few dimensions over, Shane was stretching his wings out, was wrapping them around Ryan, and Ryan was… glancing around occasionally, and then he was breaking the kiss to look over Shane’s shoulder.

“They’re… they’re so big,” Ryan said, his voice quiet, and one hand reached out, as if to feel. 

He obviously couldn’t, but… it was enough that he could see it.

There was a strangeness, to having something that had been unseen for millennia suddenly be acknowledged. 

“How many are there?”

Ryan’s forehead was against Shane’s temple, and he was still looking - his eyelashes were ticklish against Shane’s cheek, as he blinked.

“I didn’t ever really… count,” said Shane. “They were always just there.”

“Right,” said Ryan. “I can’t see them… I can’t see them if I look straight at them. But when I’m looking sidelong, they’re almost there.”

Shane nodded. 

“They’re more an idea than a… thing, in and of itself,” said Shane. 

“Are those eyes?”

“Of a sort.”

“Could I touch them?”

_You did, the last time,_ Shane almost said, but Ryan hadn’t noticed, and there was some shit that Shane just… didn’t want to bring up. 

“I don’t think so. They’re not in a dimension you inhabit.”

“Could they be? In a dimension I inhabit, I mean.”

“Not without burning the city to a crisp,” said Shane. 

They were both talking very, very quietly.

Ryan was shaking. 

Shane glanced into Ryan’s mind, saw it… racing, but not burning.

Not breaking.

“You’re like a nuke in oversized human form, aren’t you?”

“You weren’t complaining about my oversized form the last time I fucked you,” Shane said, and he grabbed Ryan’s ass, squeezing it and pulling Ryan closer to him.

Ryan shuddered, his hips rolling forward. 

“Fuck,” Ryan mumbled. 

“Do you want me to?”

“To fuck me?”

“I’d like to fuck you,” said Shane, “but I’d also kind of like a blowjob.”

“Giving or receiving?”

Ryan rolled his hips, his cock pressed against Shane’s thigh, as Shane reached between them, to squeeze it.

“I dunno,” said Shane, his tone mild. “What would you like?”

In answer, Ryan slid down, sliding his hands up Shane’s inner thighs, pushing them open, hands sliding up and down the denim. 

“Oh,” said Shane. “Just, uh… remember not to swallow, maybe?”

“Didn’t you already burn me?”

Ryan was unbuttoning Shane’s pants, unzipping them, and then Shane’s cock was out, dripping pre down the shaft.

Ryan wrapped a hand around Shane’s cock, stroked it from root to tip. 

Shane’s toes curled, right into the lino, and he moaned, his head tilting back, his mouth falling open. 

He looked down, and he saw Ryan looking up at him.

“You know,” Ryan said, and he pressed a little kiss to the head of Shane’s cock, “I didn’t believe you when you said you were an angel.”

“It’s kinda… hard to believe,” Shane said, and he had a hand on Ryan’s head, his fingers in Ryan’s hair, gently. 

“You don’t look like an angel. You look like you got stuck in a taffy machine accident at the wrong age.”

“My face is… my face is oddly compelling.”

“But if you can change your appearance, why keep the whole taffy monster thing?”

“Now I’m a taffy monster?”

Shane was beginning to shake, as Ryan’s fist kept pumping him, the sound very loud, the wet drag of skin on skin. 

“You know what I mean,” said Ryan. 

Shane snorted. 

“I… I don’t want to be too beautiful. Attract too much of a certain kind of attention.”

“You literally have an internet show with millions of fans. How is that not attracting attention?”

“It’s different,” Shane said. 

“Well,” said Ryan, “your face is kind of growing on me.”

Shane snorted, and then he moaned, because… oh god, Ryan’s mouth was just back on his cock, Ryan’s head was bobbing, as he swallowed Shane down to the root.

“Oh my god,” Shane groaned, and he kept his fingers in Ryan’s hair, as he began to roll his hips. 

“Mmm?”

“I know, there… I know, it’s dumb. But don’t stop, fuck, you feel… so good, Ryan, you’re amazing. You’re so… fucking… amazing, don’t stop, god, _Ryan_!”

Shane’s voice cracked like a plate, and his heels dug into the floor.

He was trying not to fuck Ryan’s face, but it was… it was a lot harder than it had a right to be.

He was sobbing, practically.

It was a glory, to have nerves, to have skin.

It was a wonder to live in a body, not even the kind of body that everyone else had, but a body nevertheless. 

“I’m going to come, Ry, I’m gonna… I’m gonna cpme, Ryan, Ryan, you need to… you need to… I don’t want to….” 

Ryan pulled himself deeper onto Shane’s cock, deepthroating it, and his throat was pulsing around Shane’s cock, in time with Shane’s cock pulsing, and then… oh, fuck, Shane was coming.

He didn’t have a fucking say in the matter; he came, and the light of his come shone through Ryan’s throat, and there was a flare of light at Ryan’s back, but Shane only got a glimpse of it, because he was still shaking, his hands in Ryan’s hair, his thighs like marble. 

Ryan pulled back, and he licked his lips. 

“It’s.. wow,” he said.

“Wow?”

“Good wow,” said Ryan, and he was looking bashful. 

“I didn’t know there was a bad wow,” said Shane, and he reached down to cup Ryan’s cheek. 

“There can be,” said Ryan, and he nuzzled into Shane’s hand.

Shane sighed, a long, gusty sigh, and he traced the outline of Ryan’s lips with his thumb. 

“You want me to… return the favor?”

“Do you want to?”

“I’d like to switch our positions, first,” said Ryan. 

“Right,” said Shane, and then he was standing up, his knees still wobbly.

He sat on the floor a bit too close to a heap, and then Ryan was sitting down as well, and he looked up at Ryan.

He nuzzled at Ryan’s thigh, and then he carefully unbuttoned Ryan’s pants.

He unzipped them, and then he was… pulling Ryan’s cock out, and he was nuzzling Ryan’s cock through the thin cotton, mouthing at the damp head, making it damper.

“Fuck,” Ryan said, intelligently, and then Shane was shoving Ryan’s boxers down, and he was wrapping his hand around Ryan’s cock.

He took the whole thing into his mouth, relishing the weight of it, the taste of Ryan’s skin, the thud of Ryan’s heartbeat against his tongue, the salt-bitter taste of Ryan’s pre-come.

The ashes of Ryan’s mortality.

Shane began to bob his head in earnest, and he was still sucking, doing flickering, clever things with his tongue, things that he’d learned over the course of his long life, other things that he’d made up just for Ryan, and Ryan was still curling forward, his fingers in his own hair. 

Ryan sobbed.

“Fuck,” Ryan mumbled. ‘Fuck, please, Shane, you’re… you’re fucking… you’re so… good….” 

Shane kept sucking, his hands on Ryan’s hips, beginning to bob his head a little faster, as Ryan’s cock pulsed in his throat.

“Shane… Shane Shane Shane, fuck, _Shane_!”

“Mm?”

Shane pulled off, and now he was jerking Ryan off, slow, easy strokes, spreading pre-come and spit.

Ryan groaned like he was dying, and he was clutching at Shane’s head.

“What mmm?”

“You were saying my name,” Shane said, and he was smirking, his lips swollen and wet, his chin shiny with drool. “It’s polite to respond.”

“I hate you so much,” Ryan groaned, but he was humping Shane’s fist. 

“If you hate me, do you want me to just stop?”

“Fuck you, Shane.”

“I mean, I’d have to get the lube, if you were -”

“Shane, I swear to whatever the fuck it is that controls the universe, up to and including physics, that if you don’t make me come, I’ll -”

“You’ll what, Ryan?”

“I’ll leave. I’ll walk right out.”

“Right out?”

“Right out.”

Shane snorted. 

“Well,” he said, his tone cheerful, “can’t be having that, can we?”

And then he just… swallowed Ryan down.

He didn’t have a gag reflex, and he used that.

He pressed his nose against Ryan’s belly, and he swallowed down around it, beginning to bob his head again, slurping and licking, dirty and wet, like something out of a porno. 

“Fuck,” said Ryan, and he was sobbing again, he was humping into Shane’s mouth, and he let it happen. 

He let Ryan use his mouth, let his face be fucked, let his throat be used.

He took pleasure in Ryan’s pleasure, sensing it right under Ryan’s nerves, and Ryan’s fingers were in his hair, Ryan’s hips were rolling up to meet Shane’s mouth.

Ryan was getting harder, Ryan was beginning to throb in Shane’s mouth, throb in earnest, and Shane was drooling harder, Shane was just… sucking, he was a perpetual motion machine of pleasure, as Ryan began to go completely stiff.

Ryan was leaning so far forward he was almost suffocating Shane, or at least he would have been, if Shane had to worry about that sort of thing.

Then Ryan was arching his back, and he was leaning back, his head tilted back, sobbing up to the ceiling.

Ryan’s face, as he came, was beautiful.

It was as simple as that - the kind of beautiful that would be ascribed to a saint or an angel, in a different era. 

If he was a different person.

The cords of Ryan’s throat stood out, and his jaw was clenched, his legs shaking.

He made sounds - deep, guttural sounds that made Shane’s own stomach twist up - and his come was bitter and salty was it went down Shane’s throat, as Shane swallowed it down. 

“Oh,” said Ryan, and then… then he was throwing his head back, and there was light blossoming out of his back, great, burning light that was burning through Ryan’s shirt, through the back of the chair.

The air smelled like ozone and like divinity, and Ryan’s wings spread out, scorching the table, and then they were gone, but Ryan was still sitting there, looking shell shocked.

Shane sat there, staring up at Ryan, his eyes wide.

Was this what it felt like, when mortals saw someone like him?

That… that wasn’t possible.

It just wasn’t.

You were either divine or you were mortal.

You didn’t just… gain it, somehow.

“Shane?”

Ryan’s voice was anxious, and it cracked.

“It’s fine,” Shane said, and he was shaking, just a little. “It’s… it’s all perfectly fine.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the short chapter. Hope you enjoy it, regardless!

“What you have to understand,” Shane said, and he was speaking very slowly and very carefully, “is that I’m not human.”

Ryan, sitting at the table, looking up at Shane with wide eyes, just blinked.

“I’m not human,” Shane said again, and now he was standing up - he was beginning to pace, his hands in his hair. 

He took up too much space in the kitchen, and it was too hard to get a good pace in, but he made a decent attempt.

“I know you’re not human,” said Ryan. “That’s kind of the point of all of this.”

Shane stopped his pacing.

“What?”

“Not the point,” said Ryan, and he covered his face, leaning back into the chair. “That’s not the word I meant to use.”

The air still smelled like ozone, and there were after images of the bright light in Shane’s eyes.

“What did you mean to use?”

“You’re not human,” Ryan said, “and now I’m dealing with… well, what happens with you and me being… whatever we are. Intimate.”

“Right,” said Shane. “Intimate.”

“Has this never happened before?”

“No,” said Shane. “Never.”

He stopped pacing, and he just… looked down at Ryan, his eyes bright.

Probably too bright, come to think of it.

“Ryan, I could break every finger in your hand, and you would feel pain. I could fill your nerves with enough pain that you’d forget how to breathe. I could melt your mind with pleasure, until you didn’t even know the shape of language. I am a thing beyond time, a thing beyond knowledge -”

“A thing made of ego, you mean,” Ryan interrupted.

“... what?”

Shane was caught off guard.

“You’re always pulling this shit,” Ryan said. “‘Look at me, I’m some kind of bullshit older than time celestial being or angel or whatever, I could kill you,’ who the fuck can’t, Shane?”

Ryan was standing up now, and he was… pressing closer to Shane.

His shirt was burnt off in the back, Shane noticed, in a distant sort of way. 

“Anyone can break my fingers, Shane, anyone can break my fingers or make me come or… whatever. Yeah, you’ve got some extra fancy stuff going on, but you’re not any more special than anyone else. Sure, you’re old, but I’m sure there are other people who can get just as old as you are, it just takes talent, and _anyone_ can develop that talent.”

“You’re not making any sense, Ryan,” said Shane. 

He was grinding his teeth.

Who knew he could grind his teeth?

“Don’t talk down to me,” Ryan said. 

“What?”

“I get that you’re older than trees and butt fucked by candlelight during the Revolutionary War -”

“ _Really,_ Ryan?” 

They were forehead to forehead, and they were shouting.

Shane didn’t see himself as a shouter, not really - he had the patience of a saint (he’d known quite a few… sort of). 

“You don’t get to lord over me with the fact that you’re some wise and ancient deity -”

“I’m not a deity, I’m not lording it over you, you just don’t understand some things!”

“ _I_ don’t understand some things? You’ve got it all figured out, but you know what? You were right. You’re not a person. You’re person shaped, but you’re not a person.”

And then Ryan was just… gone.

One minute he was standing in the kitchen, nose to nose with Shane, the next he was gone.

There wasn’t a flash of light, there wasn’t a poof, or a smell of ozone, or… _anything_.

Ryan was just gone.

“The fuck,” Shane said into the empty kitchen, and then he found his phone, and fired off a text message to Ryan. 

_You okay?_

Shane’s phone buzzed. 

_I’m fine. Leave me alone._

Shane gave a sigh of relief, then frowned.

_Where are you?_

Ryan sent him a picture - he was somewhere high up, looking down on a whole bunch of trees.

_That doesn’t answer my question, Ryan._

_Tough,_ came Ryan’s response.

Welp.

_Just… text me if you need anything,_ Shane said. _We can talk about how this is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE later._

_Yes, DAD_ , sent Ryan, and Shane could almost see the rolled eyes. 

Welp.

Shane sighed.

This was an entirely new experience.

He didn’t have a lot of those, in his long life.

He should have been savoring it, shouldn’t he? 

Instead, he was just standing here, wishing for a drink.

Well.

That could be solved.

* * *

Shane went to a bar.

It was a respectably seedy bar, with a bartender who scowled and the kind of shitty whiskey that could be used to clean carpet.

Shane sat in a booth and let himself get suitably maudlin.

He missed Eden. 

He missed Pompeii. 

He missed… what did he miss?

He stared into his drink, and he took another slug, and the booze had more or less evaporated in his mouth, going up towards his sinuses.

He couldn’t get drunk, per se, but he could feel it in the back of his mind.

And then Ryan was in the booth with him.

“You know,” Shane said, trying not to show how spooked he was feeling, “if people keep seeing you do that, they’re going to start making assumptions.”

“I don’t do it on purpose,” Ryan huffed, and he looked downright grumpy. “I just… wanted to be elsewhere, so I was.”

“Where elsewhere were you, exactly?”

Shane raised an eyebrow, looking Ryan up and down.

Ryan was still wearing his sweatpants, and didn’t seem to be wearing any shoes.

“So you wanna, like, share how you did that? Because _I_ can’t do that, and I’ve been at this a lot longer than you have.”

Ryan shrugged.

“Maybe I’ve got some abilities that you don’t, since I’m carbon based or made of meat or… something,” said Ryan. “Since you’ve obviously done some kind of mojo on me.”

“I didn’t do any kind of mojo on you,” Shane groused, and then he made a face, as Ryan grabbed Shane’s drink and threw it back.

“Well, I sure as fuck didn’t teleport to the top of a research station in Brazil of my own power,” said Ryan.

“Wait, Brazil? What were you doing in Brazil?!”

“I don’t fucking know,” said Ryan. “But this is your fault.”

“It is, at least a little,” Shane admitted. “But I don’t… this is all new.”

“You’re acting awfully chill about all of this,” said Ryan.

“Oh, I’m screaming very loudly on the inside,” Shane assured him. “It’s just… very deeply inside. I’m probably gonna access it at some point, burn the whole city to a crisp. I’m thinking a whole Sodom and Gomorrah kinda deal.”

“Was that you?”

“God no,” said Shane, and he sighed, a long, deep sigh. “Okay. Are you going to be okay?”

“I’m not human anymore, am I?”

Ryan sounded remarkably blase, but his eyes were very bright in the dimness of the bar.

“I have no fucking idea,” Shane said. “I’m… pretty sure that you’re not a nephil.”

“A what?”

“A child of a celestial being and a human,” said Shane. “Except you’re not.”

“... can I die?”

Anxiety was blossoming across Ryan’s face like fire now, and Shane reached out cautiously to pat Ryan on the hand. 

Ryan let him.

“I honestly don’t know,” said Shane. “I don’t know anything about this, but… I’ll do what I can to help.”

“You’d better,” said Ryan, “since it’s your fault in the first place.”

He turned his hand around, and he squeezed Shane’s fingers.

Shane sighed, and he squeezed back.

“Hey, Shane?”

“Mmm?”

“Can we go home now?”

“My home or your home?”

“Whichever home has shoes for me,” said Ryan. 

“Fair enough,” said Shane. “Shall we?” 

“Let us.” 

* * *

They went back to Ryan’s apartment, and Ryan complained the whole time, about having to walk on the dirty bar floor.

They took a rideshare back, and Ryan kept holding Shane’s hand in the back seat.

“I’m sorry I shouted at you,” Ryan said quietly.

“It’s okay,” said Shane. “I mean… don’t do it again, please, but… in the meantime, I can kinda get it.”

“I have… I have a bunch of questions,” said Ryan. 

“Can we answer them when we get home, maybe?” 

“Right.”

* * *

“Wings itch,” Ryan said, when they were both inside of his apartment. “They itch, and I can _almost_ feel them, in the other dimension. Except I also can’t, and it’s… what the fuck is up with that?”

“You’ll get used to it,” said Shane, in a tired voice. “Or maybe it’ll… y’know, stop.”

“Stop?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “Like how I couldn’t swear for a while.”

“Right,” said Shane, and then he sighed, rubbing his eyes. “I’m sorry I’ve been so… paternalistic. It’s just….” He sighed.

“Just?”

“I’ve never really had the… chance to be old,” he said. “Like, properly old. Old the way I actually _am_ , if that makes sense?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “I guess I’ve never thought about it like that.”

“Still,” said Shane. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ll stop apologizing if you do,” said Ryan.

“Sounds like a deal,” said Shane, and he put a hand on Ryan’s shoulder and squeezed.

“I’m going to shower,” said Ryan. “The bottoms of my feet feel like a tar pit.”

“How would a tar pit feel? I feel like it’d be squishy. If your feet feel squishy, I think you’ve got other things to worry about.”

“Pedant,” said Ryan, as he made his way towards the bathroom. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Shane sniffed, and then made a face.

“... could I shower with you?”

Ryan raised an eyebrow.

“I smell like bar,” said Shane. “I’d rather not smell like that.” 

“Right,” said Ryan. “Yeah, sure.”

There was an awkward moment, and then Shane reached out, cautiously, and he cupped Ryan’s cheek.

Ryan turned his face into it, and he kissed Shane’s palm. 

“I’m scared,” Ryan said, his voice very quiet.

“I am too,” said Shane.

“That helps,” said Ryan, and he sighed, a long huff of hot air against the inside of Shane’s wrist.

“Does it?”

“Yeah,” said Ryan. “If even you’re scared, it means that I’m not overreacting.”

Shane snorted, but he didn’t argue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The "I could break all of your fingers" line has been rattling around in my head for literal _months_ \- maybe I'll finally be able to get it out!

**Author's Note:**

> Like this fic?
> 
> Want me to write you something like it, or something completely different?
> 
> Come talk to me on my tumblr, theseusinthemaze.tumblr.com!


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